The politics of literal translation in Soviet Ukraine
The case of Gogol’s “The tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”
Nikolai Gogol (Ukrainian: Mykola Hoholʹ) is a notable example of a nineteenth-century Russian author of Ukrainian
origin, whose works in Ukrainian translation have always been and now remain ideologically fraught. This article discusses the
dynamics of translation – from creative stylization to awkward literalism – during the period from the late 1920s to the early
1950s. Later Ukrainian editions of Gogol’s works in the Ukrainian SSR were not substantially different from those published in the
mid-1950s, which indicates that by that time the Soviet model of Ukrainian literary language had been firmly established. It
tended to increasingly merge with Russian, taking the Russian-language writings of Gogol as a model. The study reveals a tension
between Ukrainian national idealism and the Soviet regime’s pragmatic use of language as a means of political propaganda. The
discussion further challenges Russian-to-Ukrainian literalism as a strategy for manufacturing linguistic similarities and
“naturalizing” Russian as the mother tongue.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The status of the Ukrainian language during the Stalinist period
- Literary revival of the Ukrainian language in the mid-1920s – early 1930s
- The “neoclassicists” as the key translators and stylistic editors during the national revival
- The “Works” of Mykola Hohol′ (1929–1932) and other Russian authors of Ukrainian background
- A turn to literalism in the 1930s and 1940s
- Censoring the translational language of the works of Mykola Hohol′
- The “Selected Works” of Mykola Hoholʹ (1948): From stylistic editor to Russifying
“translator”
- Mykola Hoholʹ of the high Stalinism era (1930s – early 1950s)
- The theory of translation between closely related languages
- Mykola Hoholʹ of the early twenty-first century: Emancipating the mother tongue
- Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
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