The reception of the fairy tale ''The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'' by E.T.A. Hoffmann in Russia in the 19th century

Works by Hoffmann were very conformable to the needs of the Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century. The translation and the assimilation of the artistic features of the fairy tale ''The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'' began in the 1830s at the peak of the popularity of Hoffmann in Russia. The interest to his works was so huge, because they concentrated the most important moments for the Russian literature at that time: influence of idealistic philosophy, romantic conception of the duality (the everyday and the fantastic worlds), social criticism, fantasy and grotesque. The article covers the history of Russian translations of the fairy tale ''The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'' of 1836-1899; reviews to them are analyzed in connection with the main tendencies of the development of the Russian literature, including children's literature. In the first half of the 19th century the readers were fascinated by Hoffmann's fantasy, but in the middle of the century the same fantasy was the reason of disputes on harm and good of this fairy tale for children. By the end of the century in Russia the interest to children's reading raised, so that many contradictory reviews of the fairy tale were published. The feature of the receptive model of the fairy tale ''The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'' is that its artistic reception occurred in the Russian literature earlier than the first translation was published in 1836. The translations of the 19th century were adaptations, most of them reproduced neither cultural features of the original text nor the features of Hoffman's creative method. At the same time the interest to the personality and works of Hoffmann in Russia in the 1820-1830s favored the reading of his works in the German original or in French translations. That is why we can find not only separate motives of the fairy tale ''The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'', but also such Hoffmann's artistic methods, as a combination of fantastic and real plans of narration, onomatopoeia in the fairy tales of A. Pogorelsky, V. Odoevsky and A. Tolstoy. Meanwhile there is no direct imitation in the fairy tales of the Russian writers. The convergence is based on different aspects: Hoffmann's fantasy, attention to the child's soul, possibility to give a moral lesson or to represent satirically the crisis of the society. The interest to Hoffmann in Russia in the 1830s is closely connected with activation of the genre of fairy tale. It is possible to suppose that at the time the fairy tale replaces the ballad which has already lost such elements as mysticism and miracle. Its place was occupied in Russia by the incipient genre of a romantic (fantastic) fairy tale. By the end of the 19th century it was more important to show the contemporary society in the critical way.

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