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THE RECEPTION OF OSCAR WILDE IN LATVIA

I. Kacane, O. Kovzele, I. Laha

Abstract

The paper analyses the reception of the Irish-born British writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) in Latvia following the translations of his works into Latvian and the most vivid expressions in Latvian authors’ creative writing. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the poetics of cross-cultural influences in Latvia was very diverse: one of the most striking being the aesthetic vector marked by the crucial influence of Wilde’s personality and his literary heritage. The dialogue held between Latvian national and foreign cultures served not only as a means for the nation’s self-realization, but developed also a new understanding of the role of art. The research is based on the reception theory that interprets literature as a process of aesthetic communication the participants of which are three logically distinguishable entities – author, text, and recipient (reader, critic, audience) – attributing to the last one the status of both receiver and mediator. Using a complex of research methods (comparative, cultural-historical, biographical, structural-semiotic), the main attention in the paper is paid to the ways of accumulation of a foreign text focusing also on the readiness of the target (Latvian) culture to receive the novel influences by the specific author (Oscar Wilde) and to integrate them in one’s own (Latvian) cultural space. Based on “foreignization” and “domestication” (L. Venuti) strategies in intercultural translation any text is regarded as an open structure and a continuous process of its perception, thus a productive cognition takes place (H. R. Jauss). As a result of intercultural communication between foreign literature and/or its famous mythologized representative and a domestic literature, modifications in recipients’ attitudes, behaviours, and creative writing in different time periods (a chronological review of reception) are observed. The research allowed concluding that infatuation with Wilde’s ideas in Latvia never ceased and the reception occurs under the influence of two parallel flows: 1) in the discourse related to cultural and literary elitism – Symbolism and Modernism (a novel, plays); 2) as a component of mass literature (fairytales and other stories for children and youth).

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2017/HB61/S11.31

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