The “imperial code” of the novel Tancred; or, The New Crusade by Benjamin Disraeli in the Russian translation of the 19th century

The article focuses on the translation reception of the political novel Tancred; or, The New Crusade by Benjamin Disraeli in Russia in the second half of the 19th century. In spite of the fact that Disraeli's popularity was not as great as that of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, he was one of the founders of the political fiction genre, thus enriching the Victorian literature of the 19th century. The novel under study laid the foundation for that genre model not only in Great Britain, but also abroad. The Russian translation of Disraeli's novel called “Tankred” [Tancred] is analyzed in the article in regards to the development of the British Empire in the 1870s. The research is based on the translation version published in the magazine Zhurnal romanov i povestey [Magazine of Novels and Short Stories], a literary supplement to the Nedelya [Week] newspaper, in 1878, 30 years after the publication of the original in England. The article analyzes the specifics of the novel's reception in Russia in the context of Disraeli's politics during the 1860s-1870s. As a consequence of the Berlin Congress in 1878, the political novel Tancred; or, The New Crusade was perceived as a prophetic work due to the implementation of Disraeli's political plans described in the novel. The plot was associated with the idea of Disraeli-politician to establish the British Empire both in the West and in the East. So the attention of Russian critics and readers to the novel in the second half of the 19th century can be explained by the requirements of Russian literary processes of that time as well as by the political and social conditions. The given research is of importance in terms of translation reception as the translation reveals not only the translator's attitude to the original work and its author, but also the peculiarities in the reception of foreign literature by the Russian reader at a definite historical period of time. The comparison of the translation and the original has shown that the translation reception of the novel was mainly determined by the context of popular literature and adapted to the Russian environment. The chosen translation strategy based on the readers' “horizon of expectation” and Disraeli's literary reputation was aimed at conveying the political context of the novel focusing on the issues of the British Empire, thus neglecting the philosophical and religious aspects, which results in a considerable semantic compression of the original. The translation is also characterized by loose handling of the original text and introduction of Russicisms used to achieve the mentioned aims. Nevertheless, the analysis has demonstrated that the translation, for all its differences from the original, sets the stage for the genre model of the political novel in Russia and renders the key elements of Disraeli's poetics into the Russian language.

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