Abstract
The present project proposes to investigate the reception of British, French and Italian literature in Stalin’s USSR through the study of the paratexts of literary translations that were produced in that period. The assumption underlying this project is that paratexts – articles, reviews, and didactic materials that accompany translations – shape the readers’ interpretation of foreign texts in the receiving cultures. In a totalitarian state closed off to the outside world, paratexts become one of the few sources of information about European culture for the majority of readers who are unable to experience it directly. However, this information is often distorted to make it fit with the official ideology. The project corresponds to HORIZON-CL2-2021-DEMOCRACY-01-01 and partly to HORIZON-CL2-2021-DEMOCRACY-01-04. It is directly linked to the problem of cultural exclusion and xenophobia as an external challenge to European liberal democracy. The strategic objectives of the proposed study are as follows: 1. to understand which ideological strategies were used by the mediators of European culture in Stalinist Russia to shape Soviet citizens’ perceptions of Western values; 2. to investigate whether criticism of Western literature can be used as a tool against official cultural discourse. Practical Research Objectives: 1. to identify the boundaries of the influence of the main trends of Soviet cultural policy on the ideological stances of the authors of paratexts that accompanied Soviet translations of Italian, French and British literature; 2. to describe the evolution of xenophobic discourse within the binary opposition of “our” and “alien” in literary journals which published translations of contemporary literature as well as reviews of these translations; 3. to describe the ideological divergences between Soviet and Western paratexts of the contemporary European works that were particularly popular in the USSR. The literatures which have been selected to be analyzed, all of which were actively translated in Stalinist Russia, reflect three different cultural and political situations in Europe in the thirties and early forties. Thus, our aim is to construct a picture of the projection of different types of European cultures in Soviet culture. A fundamentally new approach in the project's methodology is to analyse the reception of cultures not through translations, but through their paratexts, and to combine two theoretical perspectives in the research process by locating our analysis both in the context of the history of literary criticism in Stalin’s USSR and in the context of the history of Soviet literary translation. The main research outputs will be: 1. a database containing a selection of digitised critical and didactic texts devoted to Italian, French and British literatures in Stalin’s USSR; 2. the development of a theoretical model of ideological trends in Soviet translation criticism, taking into account the trends in contemporary Western criticism; 3. a digital platform which will allow to consult the above-mentioned corpus in two different ways: 1) alphabetical library-style consultation; 2) more dynamic consultation corresponding to the theoretical model of ideological tendencies in translation paratexts.
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Kristina Landa
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione
Coordinatore:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Contributo totale di progetto: Euro (EUR) 228.259,00
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 81.339,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
30/11/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
