Scholarly record

CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN LATVIA: E. VODOLAZKIN'S OEUVRE

A. Stankevica, I. Dvorecka, E. Vasiljeva, E. Isajeva, N. Zeile

Abstract

The active perception and assimilation of a wide Western European, Eastern European and American cultural context is one of the most important developmental trends in Latvian literary process. Translations of Russian literature into Latvian are not very demanded, though they are rather significant. Yevgeny Vodolazkin (b. 1964), Doctor of Philology, expert in Old Russian culture, author of several novels, collections of essays and literary travelogues, is among the most popular and widely read writers. “Laurus” (2012) and “The Aviator” (2016), the two most popular novels by the writer, were translated into Latvian a year after their Russian publication. Both novels became available to the Latvian reader thanks to Mara Polakova (b. 1974), talented translator, expert in the field of cultural history and theology, owner of Latvia’s major award for translation of literary texts (2010). In one of her interviews devoted to the craft of translation, M. Polakova described the process of translation as a creative communication with a close person, a friend, and she characterised literary translation as a form of intercultural communication. The article analyses the history of the translations of Y. Vodolazkin’s novels into Latvian, the dialectics of the perception of these two novels by readers in Latvia, as well as the scientific reception of the writer’s oeuvre in Latvia. The aim of the present study is to find out the reasons for the Latvian readership’s interest in Y. Vodolazkin’s oeuvre and the role of the pragmatic function of the translations of Y. Vodolazkin’s novels into Latvian in producing communicative effect, as well as to study the means of rendering the meaning of the content, the emotional expressiveness and the verbal structure reproduction of the original text. The research methodology is based on an interdisciplinary approach that combines elements from the methods of cultural anthropology, comparative philological analysis, sociolinguistics, component and contextual analysis. The translation of Y. Vodolazkin’s novels “Laurus” and “The Aviator” into Latvian caused a rather intensive discussion among the reading public in social networks and among literary critics because of the topical issues presented in them. The novel “Laurus” attracted the attention particularly by its specific interpretation of the relationships between the Middle Ages and the Modernity and the personal responsibility of man for what is happening around him. “The Aviator” is a book that deals with an issue, which is very painful for Latvia – repression in the USSR. The internal discussion of the death threat to personality and the possibility of its revival through repentance turned out to be fundamentally important.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SWS.ISCAH.2019.1/S27.059

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