José Vergara’s “All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature”

By Dilip -

 … like Ulysses, I drive myself forward,... 

but move, as before, backward  - Joseph Brodsky, “I am like Ulysses”

IT TOOK ODYSSEUS 20 years to return to Ithaca, and James Joyce’s Ulysses had to wait 67 years before reaching the Russian reader. In both instances, a war contributed to the delay. In the novel’s case, it was the Cold War, as well as the Soviet establishment’s hostile attitude toward experimental prose. The first full Russian translation of Ulysses, by Viktor Khinkis and Sergei Khoruzhy, was published in 1989. The first full Russian translation of Finnegans Wake did not see the light of day until 2021, just a few months ago.

José Vergara: All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature

Reviewed by Nataliya Karageorgos

To read Joyce in the Soviet Union was indeed to tempt fate. It serves to remember that the novel was also banned for over a decade in the United States after its publication by Shakespeare and Company in Paris, but in the Soviet context, the stakes were higher. The widow of Igor Romanovich - a Russian translator who translated Ulysses for the journal International Literature in 1935 and perished in Stalin’s Gulag soon after - stated that he was arrested because of Joyce.

The epitome of Western modernism, Joyce embodied all that the literary officials found hostile to the cultural demands of the Soviet state: formalism, pessimism, individualism, complexity, naturalism. “A pile of dung teeming with worms, photographed with a cinema apparatus through a microscope - that’s Joyce,” declared Karl Radek at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, a year after the US court ruled that the ban on Ulysses would be dropped...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/am-i-like-ulysses-on-jose-vergaras-all-future-plunges-to-the-past-james-joyce-in-russian-literature/


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