Promoting Soviet culture in Britain: the history of the Society for Cultural Relations Between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, 1924–45

ArticleThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available via http://dx.doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.108.2.0571This article examines the history of the Society for Cultural Relations between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR (SCR) from its inception to the end of the Second World War. It argues that although the Society toed the Party line, it was controlled by British left-wing intellectuals rather than by Soviet agents or agencies. The SCR is shown to have been a broad church in the period, whose membership included intellectuals from a wide range of fields with varied interests in Soviet culture. Its history, it is argued, reveals the significance of Soviet culture for British intellectuals and one route of its dissemination in Britain

Leningrad poetry 1953-75

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Literature as “a little bridge”: exchange between British and Soviet writers in the post-war period

Articlehe article is dedicated to the history of contacts between the British and Soviet writers in 1945—1956. The major thrust is put on activities of the Writers’ Group in the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR and especially on the figure of its leader — the British novelist and scriptwriter John Boynton Priestley. On the basis of new documents from the archive of the Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies (London) the author analyzes both the inner discussions between the critics and defenders of contacts with Soviet writers during the most severe years of the Cold War and the outer contacts with Soviet counteractors threw the system of VOKS in the USSR (the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries), paying special attention to the so-called “questionnaires” which became one of the major forms of interactions between the two sides. The central issue during these interactions was the issue of a writer’s role in the post-war society. The author comes to a conclusion that despite of the obvious formal restrictions in the existed contacts and the Aesopian language of Soviet answers, the activities of the Writers’ Group one can consider to be successful. The irony of fate was that it just failed to wait a little bit till the beginning of the “thaw period” in the USSR and disbanded itself in the middle of 1950s. © http://history.jes.su/s207987840001329-0-1-e

Between ideology and literature: translation in the USSR during the Brezhnev period

ArticleCopyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Perspectives: Studies in Translatology on 14 January 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0907676X.2015.1032311The USSR’s de-Stalinization and liberalization under Khrushchev opened up the country to the West and led to a boom in the translation of foreign and especially Western literature. After the Thaw, however, Soviet society is generally seen to have moved into a period of stagnation, characterized by a cooling in its enthusiasm for America, and the West more generally. This article will examine the fate of translated literature in the less congenial environment of the Brezhnev years, looking in particular at translations in the journal Novyi mir 1965–1981. It will show that although there were changes in the profile of the translations published during the period, overall, translation cannot be said to have undergone stagnation. It asks how translation was used by different agents: the Party, editors, and translators. It will argue that translation continued to be seen by the Party as symbolic of the ‘friendship of the peoples’, but was used by editors and translators to publish artistically diverse and challenging works. It will show how various strategies were employed by the journal’s editors and translators to present texts in such a way as to get them past the censor

Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry

The canon of Russian poetry has been reshaped since the fall of the Soviet Union. A multi-authored study of changing cultural memory and identity, this revisionary work charts Russia's shifting relationship to its own literature in the face of social upheaval. Literary canon and national identity are inextricably tied together, the composition of a canon being the attempt to single out those literary works that best express a nation's culture. This process is, of course, fluid and subject to significant shifts, particularly at times of epochal change. This volume explores changes in the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to the end of Putin's second term as Russian President in 2008. In the wake of major institutional changes, such as the abolition of state censorship and the introduction of a market economy, the way was open for wholesale reinterpretation of twentieth-century poets such as Iosif Brodskii, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandel'shtam, their works and their lives. In the last twenty years many critics have discussed the possibility of various coexisting canons rooted in official and non-official literature and suggested replacing the term “Soviet literature” with a new definition - “Russian literature of the Soviet period”. Contributions to this volume explore the multiple factors involved in reshaping the canon, understood as a body of literary texts given exemplary or representative status as “classics”. Among factors which may influence the composition of the canon are educational institutions, competing views of scholars and critics, including figures outside Russia, and the self-canonising activity of poets themselves. Canon revision further reflects contemporary concerns with the destabilising effects of emigration and the internet, and the desire to reconnect with pre-revolutionary cultural traditions through a narrative of the past which foregrounds continuity. Despite persistent nostalgic yearnings in some quarters for a single canon, the current situation is defiantly diverse, balancing both the Soviet literary tradition and the parallel contemporaneous literary worlds of the emigration and the underground. Required reading for students, teachers and lovers of Russian literature, Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry brings our understanding of post-Soviet Russia up to date