The differential form of reception: “Le Chevalier double” by Th. Gautier and “Milyi pazh” by F. Sologub

The paper deals with the translation of Th. Gautier’s novella “Le Chevalier double” provided in Russian by F. Sologub and published in two versions: “Dvoistvennyi rytsar’” (1899) and “Dvoinaya zvezda” (1906). The following peculiarities of the translator’s work are considered: the choice of the word from the range of synonyms, avoiding grammatical features of the French language, and stylistic sophistication of the target text, all these indicating the careful piece of work made by the translator. When comparing the translated and original works, the authors identified a number of texts reminiscent of Gautier’s novella. The majority of these writings were created about the time of the second publication, suggesting intense reflection on the original and its creative interpretation, with the process taking a long period of time (several years or even more). “Milyi pazh” was regarded as the most suggestive of the French novella and thus was studied in detail. The comparison between these two allowed identifying a number of mutual characteristics (including the characters and even their names), showing the source text of translation to be the pretext for the original novella by Sologub. It is noteworthy that the pretext was used not only to develop the motifs typical for Sologub’s art but also to distance from Gautier’s art and to question the validity of fairy-tale, which turns out to be too far from the real life. “Milyi pazh” dispels the didactic pathos of the novella by Gautier, with the characters changing from decent to cynical ones. The irony comes throughout the novella by the author-translator, thus revealing the differential form of reception: “Milyi pazh” is a thinly disguised polemics against the text that Sologub translated to a high standard.

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