Reception of W. Godwin's Caleb Williams social-criminal novel in Russia of 1830s - 1860s

W. Godwin's novel Things as They Are, or the Adventures of CalebWilliams'(1794) laid the ground for the further development of social-criminal and then detective genre not only in England but alsoabroad. The novel was translated into Russian in 1838. The reception of this writing in Russia is topical for us as it opens rich andfruitful history of this genre model perception in the Russian literature of the 19th century. The reviews of the novel were published inthe Russian periodicals in the same 1838 in such ideologically diverse magazines as Sovremennik, Syn Otechestva, Biblioteka dlyaChteniya, Russkiy Invalid, and Severnaya Pchela. The authors of the articles were such outstanding representatives of the Russiancritical thought as P.А. Pletnev, N.А. Polevoy, F.V. Bulgarin, V.G. Belinskiy. The analysis of critical reviews of the translated novelreveals genuine interest in it: critics were interested in the writing's ideological base, its structure, characters, and plot lines.Nevertheless, the English novel was wasted upon and perceived as old-fashioned and irrelevant for the reader of the late 1830s due tothe other literary epoch and different artistic method. Much attention was likely to be paid to the questions of translation in the Russianperiodicals of the late 1830s. In fact, Godwin's novel was an artistic workshop where men of letters solved the problems of a translator'sinitiative, his responsibility for keeping work with artistic values for the readers. The next wave of reception of the English novel was inthe 1860s when the novel was recollected owing to the new development stage in the Russian literature. It was this period when thegenre of social-criminal novel started to form under the influence of its English and French models, when the theme of crime andpunishment,the humiliated and outcasts became urgent for the Russian literary process. At that time the perspective of the foreignwriting perception was changing: the novel was not discussed in periodicals, but its consideration occurred at a different, higher level -in works of the Russian writers. In this connection one could name F.М. Dostoevsky and N.G. Chernyshevsky. On the whole, in theRussian literary process there were two peaks of interest in the English writer's work: at the end of the 1830s the critics' attention wasfocused on plot construction, problems, and character analysis (in this case some artistic elements were wasted upon) and in the 1860sthere was a more comprehensive perception resulting in its critical understanding of the Russian writers interpreting ideas and methodsdeveloped by Godwin in Caleb Williams in their writing.

Keywords

Authors

References