Profanation of classics or mass culture technology? Modern strategy of publishing works by George Sand

The popularity George Sand is confirmed by incessant editions and re-editions of works of the French writer, as well as readers' comments on them in various blogs. But the publishing of the compositions by George Sand in present-day Russia undergoes the influence of technologies of mass culture. Every year tens of publishing houses (mainly in Moscow and St. Petersburg) reprint the most known novels of the French writer. Tens of George Sand's novels have audio-versions today. There also is an audio-book devoted to George Sand. The most demanded are about twenty novels and short stories, which are constantly republished to satisfy the reader's wants. Unfortunately, the majority of editions suffers a poor, primitive set of explanations, notes. As a rule, there is no preface explaining the problem of the story, the historical context of its creation to the reader . But other methods appealing to mass media technologies are used. Efforts of publishers are to sell as much production as possible, without spending additional resources. For this publishing houses are guided by the needs of the "average" reader. Often the cover has a sort of a logo to mark the "Love" genre of the novel. Publishing houses use conscious deception or delusion of readers. For example, the Moscow publishing house "EKSMO" which tirelessly uses the success of Sand's novels with the reader, made a tricky move: it uses the name of George Sand as a pseudonym to publish novels of a certain Jacqueline Sand, who may be a Russian by origin. Sometimes publishing houses make prefaces to editions to earn a better reputation. These texts often written by casual people are not only superficial and trite, but also plenty of blunders. All this testifies to the low level of activity even of capital publishing houses in Russia, caused by the disorder in book production in the 1990s. It is especially necessary to note the visual material reflected in the latest editions of George Sand's works, which is vulgar and random. The frivolity of images, the lure of the presented female models perfectly correspond to the platitude of prefaces and comments in many modern Sand's editions. A comforting fact is the three new translations of George Sand's works: "A Winter in Mallorca" (L.: Leningrad publishing house, 2009) translated by N. Sidifarova, "Francia" translated by T. Kovalyova (M.: Transit Book, 2005), and, at last, "Spiridion" translated and prefaced by V. Milchina. But there are about ten more fine novels by George Sand still unknown to the Russian reader as their translations, incomplete and even fragmentary, often primitive or distorted, are lost in the Russian magazines and newspapers of the 19th century.

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