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Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches” Issue 1 (24), 2019 ISSN 2587-8093

Research methodology

The purpose of this article is to determine the presence of interest in the English-speaking society to the translation texts of Russian authors for about 120 years and to identify trends that influenced the change of this interest.

The object of this study was the translation of works of Russian authors into English and other world languages, performed in different time periods of the 20 – 21st centuries. The subject of the study appeared to be the patterns that led to the implementation of the idea of translation, trends that influenced the quantity, quality, prevalence of translations of certain authors in English-speaking countries and in the world as a whole.

The material of the study was:

-historical evidence of sociopolitical processes that led to the emergence of translations of Russian writers;

-print statistics in Russia, England and America;

-the bibliographic database of the UNESCO Index Translationum and the Publishers Weekly;

-thematic Internet resources relating to materials about projects supported by the Federal Agency for the Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation;

-thematic Internet resources pointing to official data on translators and translations implemented in both diachronic and synchronous contexts.

In the process of collecting material and further understanding of the processes in the global translation industry, when analyzing the main trends affecting these processes and in identifying patterns typical for this particular vector of research, we used certain scientific methods, namely: the method of scientific observations, the method of comparison, method of analysis and synthesis, method of generalization, method of description, method of analogy, and some others.

Research results

The problem of translation was relevant, starting from ancient times; its history began long before the appearance of writing. Without a translation culture, it is difficult to imagine the development of certain civilizations (for example, Sumerian, Babylonian, or Roman), and according to the classic of Russian literature N.G. Chernyshevsky “The literature in translation… has always had a very important part in the development of national self-awareness” 4 . It is difficult to disagree with this in terms of world culture development of during previous centuries.

Russian literature (works by A. Pushkin, N. Gogol, L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, N. Ostrovsky, etc.) translated into European languages was highly appreciated and in demand in the 19th century, and literary translation as a separate direction of literary activity flourished during this period, exerting an inspiring influence on the creative intelligentsia of Europe 5 .

The first half of the 20th century in Russia was marked by dramatic events in the country: wars, revolution, change of political regime, terror, games for the power of numerous political trends, later a rigid ideology, and literature as a mirror reflected in itself these processes. Such authors - poets and prose writers - were the majority (M.A. Bulgakov, A. Platonov, A. Bely, M. Sholokhov, K. Balmont, N. Gumilev, A. Akhmatova, and many others.). But there were authors who continued to develop in their works the ideas of the previous, “golden” 19th century of Russian literature (for example, I. A. Bunin, A. I. Kuprin or L. Tolstoy and A. P. Chekhov who were still working at the beginning of the twentieth century). These authors reluctantly succumbed to the new, “nihilistic” tendencies of the twentieth century literature. Contacts of Russian and English literature still continued in this difficult time through translations and not only.

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Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches” Issue 1 (24), 2019 ISSN 2587-8093

The revolutionary events of 1917 in the political system of Russia significantly influenced the literary relations between Russia, Europe, England and America. The emigration of a whole pleiad of Russian writers, poets and philosophers in the first third of the twentieth century (I. Bunin, V. Nabokov, N. Berdyaev, D. Merezhkovsky, I. Ilyin, S. Frank and many others) makes it possible to speak of "Russian literary emigration” 6 as a social and cultural phenomenon, primarily in France and England, Germany and America. Reflections of the Russian creative intelligentsia that flooded these countries were turned to the quest for development for the

“new” Russia, which led to a huge flow of works - from fiction to literary and philosophical essay, which was published abroad, often first in translation, and later on in Russian.

Speaking directly about relations between Russian literary thought and the English reader in the early 20th century, it should be noted that the translations of Russian authors became a definite means of influencing the public opinion of England in the hands of Russian political émigrés. But the language barrier was a serious obstacle for the English in their search for the

“Russian soul”, so Russian music, ballet and painting, which aroused considerable interest among the English public at the beginning of the 20th century, stimulated the expressed interest of England’s cultural elite in literature 6 . In the first two decades of the 20th century, the largest number of translations of books by Russian authors into English was completed for the entire previous and, possibly, subsequent history of literary contacts between the countries. Last but not least reason for this process was influence of political forces but despite this, critics note that the result of a large flow of translated literature was the growth of Russia's cultural authority 6 .

Works of classics of Russian literature of the 19th century (not involving political propaganda) (by N. Goncharov, L. Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky and many others) were also actively translated. F.M. Dostoevsky became famous in England even before the publication of translations of his works. Thus, at the end of the 19th century, the writer was invited to London to the International Literary Congress, where he was elected a member of the honorary committee of the International Literary Association 7 . In a letter notifying the writer about this event, the committee of the English literary society called him one of the "most famous representatives of modern literature" 8 . Such novels of F. Dostoevsky as “Crime and Punishment” and “Idiot” were translated into English at the end of the 19th century. After the translation of the ”The Brothers Karamazov” in 1912 by Constance Garnett (one of the first translators of F. Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, and A. Chekhov) and "Demons" in 1914, the love for the Russian author of the English aristocracy reached its apogee and, as critics say, it was like worshiping 6 . On the wave of popularity during this period also remained translations of various works by L. Tolstoy and A. Chekhov as a heritage of the previous century, but great attention of the English public was paid to the translations of works by writers of a new age - M. Gorky, L. Andreev, D. Merezhkovsky, M. Artsybashev.

Translations of this period were made by English translators, their Russian friendswriters, representatives of both the “old” and the “new” emigration (C. Garnett, S. Kostelyansky, V. Wolf, N. Duddington, M.I. Zakrevskaya Benkendorf Budberg, G. P. Struve, S. V. Pring, W. D. Birkbek, and many others.). It is necessary to mention that in this period of the history of culture of England there could be revealed close contacts between its literary life and the important creative and life stages of Russian writers. The creative way of such prominent representatives of Russian literature as A. Tolstoy, M. Tsvetaeva, N. Teffi, A. Akhmatova, E. Zamyatin, I. Bunin, B. Pilnyak, V. Nabokov, B. Pasternak, N. Gumilev and many other poets, writers, philosophers who worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, is associated with the literary fate of England. Amongst Russian thinkers N. Berdyaev was the most popular in England - almost all of his books were translated into English. Many Russian writers corresponded with their English colleagues (B. Pilnyak, A. P. Bunina, I. Bunin), made trips to this country (N. Gumilev, M. Gorky, N. Nikitin, B. Pilnyak, A. Tolstoy, I. Bunin, M. Tsvetaeva),

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(V. Nabokov). They were translated a lot and fought for the English reader - these are the main trends in contacts between Russian literature and Great Britain the beginning of the twentieth century. One cannot deny the influence of Russian translation literature on the worldview and, of course, the attitude to Russia of such English writers as V. Wolf, J. Galsworthy, D. Orwell, G. Wells, B. Shaw, D. G. Lawrence, etc. 6 .

America can also rightfully be considered a desirable country for Russian émigrés of the early twentieth century, especially for arts emigration. Freedom of thought and words proclaimed on the overseas continent, of course, attracted the Russian literary intelligentsia first of all by the impossibility of the existence of these freedoms on such a scale in their homeland.

There are critics who believe that the rise, which occurred in literature of the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, the emergence of such names as Thomas Wolfe,

Ernst Hemingway, Faulkner, and others, is explained by the influence of Russian literature. “It was an unexpected influence of the great Russian literature, picked up across the ocean,” states the writer and literary critic I.P. Zolotussky 9 .

There is no point arguing with the words of the famous literary historian. In the middle of the last century, Ernest Hemingway admitted: “Another wonderful world was given to me by Russian writers ... I read all the works of Turgenev, all things of Gogol translated into English, and … all English editions of Chekhov “ 10 .

In E. Hemingway's letters we find the following lines: “Compared to Tolstoy, the description of our Civil War by Stephen Crane seemed like a brilliant invention of a sick boy who had never seen a war” 10 is another evidence of the triumph of the Russian great classics in the American literary environment of the early twentieth century. But in this quote lies a hidden irony: the novel of the classic of American literature by Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, was written, as the author acknowledged, under the influence of L. Tolstoy, and this novel is still considered in the United States as one of the best works on civil war. It can be said that such was the tendency of the American young literature of the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century - the tangible and recognized (in contrast to a number of English writers of that time) influence of the Russian classics.

In the mid-twentieth century, the presence of Russian literature continued to a greater extent in the UK. If America, not least because of its remoteness, lost its dependence on works and translations of Russian literature, which led to a decrease in the number of translations performed by American translators, in England representatives of the emigrating aristocracy, despite active assimilation with the indigenous population, and thanks to her, they actively maintained their ties with Russian culture in many of its manifestations, and, in particular, through literary ties. The activists established the Pushkin House, an initiative that gave birth to a whole galaxy of Russian and English-speaking translators such as V. Polukhina, D. Weisbort, T. Volskaya, K.L. Zinoviev, M. Karp, R. Chandler, R. McEin, K. Hunter-Blair and many others.

Based on the studies of a renowned Russian scholar and bibliologist E.L. Nemirovsky of publishing and translation activities in the world from 1965 to 1985, we conclude that the level of this activity in England and the USA was low and, moreover, the author describes this phenomenon as “traditional” in these countries. Despite the fact that in England the number of translated publications grew every year: from 1965 to 1987 the number of these publications the almost tripled (from about 600 to almost 1600 units) the proportion of translations in the total book production remained extremely low there: in 1980 it was about three percent of the number of publications, and in 1985 it fell to two percent 11 . The situation with the publication of translated works in America is no better. Book production in the second half of the twentieth century steadily increased (this trend continues today, printed publications are issued in millions of copies), and the number of translated publications has been steadily falling, and

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Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches” Issue 1 (24), 2019 ISSN 2587-8093

in the 80s of the last century the share of remittances in the total book production was lower than one percent. It is worth mentioning that the Netherlands, Spain and Finland were confident leaders in the second half of the twentieth century in the number of translations made from foreign languages into national ones.

A visual analysis of the world popularity rating of translations of works of Russian authors into foreign languages in general and into English in particular in the second half of the 20 - early 21st centuries will be helped by the analysis of statistics in the Index Translationum - a bibliographic database created with the support of UNESCO and containing information about translations of books of various styles and genres published worldwide.

The information we analyze in the Index Translationum online database is a list of 1,000 names of authors whose books have been the most translatable in the last 30 years or so. The place of one or another author on this list is explained on the basis of the number of translations of the author’s books made in a foreign language. The Index was founded by the League of Nations in 1932, when it began its work, and is one of the long-standing programs of UNESCO. According to official data, Index Translationum has more than 2,000,000 entries for 500,000 authors and 78,000 publishers in 148 countries of the world 12 . At the same time, it is worth noting that data for not all countries are included in the Index in full. There are countries, information on translations in which is reflected for the period between 1979 and 2012, but for a number of countries data are not regularly reflected until 2000/2009. Nevertheless, for our study, the data from the Index are quite demonstrative for the corresponding time interval, since the information about the countries of interest to us (USA, UK) is presented symmetrically. Since 2013, Index Translationum has not been updated, therefore, to update data on the current state of demand for translations of books by Russian authors, we will use additional sources of information:

thematic Internet resources,

data from publishing houses and

materials on projects supported by the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications.

Despite the fact that the Index Translationum team (the INDEX team) adhered to a number of specific principles in determining the author’s position in its rating (which is subject to certain criticism), and there are some subtleties in the calendar representation that we identified, today it is the most global data system translations made over such a long period of time around the world, and is quite reliable for the period from 1979 to 2012.

Despite the fact that this project was established by UNESCO in 1932, the Index was computerized only in 1979, data on transfers until this year can be found in the UNESCO library in Paris and in national repositories 12 . So we performed a sample of Russian authors represented on this UNESCO list of 1000 names, and identified 39 names of Russian authors. After analyzing the number of translations of authors into English and into other world languages, we came to the conclusion that this relationship is asymmetrical. Let us demonstrate it in the form of a diagram, which is a visualization of the demand for translations of authors into world languages based on the principle of decreasing - from the greatest popularity to the least demanded authors. The diagram also displays data on the number of translations of the same authors into English:

Diagram "The ratio of the number of translations of books by Russian authors into English relative to the total number of translations of the author according to Index Translationum"

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The pronounced distance between the volumes of world publications of translations of Russian authors and their English-speaking parallel is obvious. We find at least two explanations to this fact. The first reason for this dissonance is that the UK and the USA remain the largest producers of book products, which are very diverse, and in these countries there is no shortage of “consumers” of these products, so England and America do not need additional sources of ideas in the form of translated literature, it is enough for them to be mutually interested in each other's book market. Thus, it becomes clear that the books most in demand in the world of translation practice are often far from being the most popular and often completely

“alien” for the English language. As the French sociologist of literature R. Escarpy claimed in 1969, such isolation of English and American literature can become a source of a dangerous phenomenon - “closure of the country in its culture” 13 , and both England and America as countries of indisputable financial and intellectual power may be in danger. Our analysis showed that since 1969, the situation in the publishing and translation activities of these countries has not much changed, but it was not within the objectives of our study to assess the level of cultural development of these countries. The second reason may be found in the studies of E.L. Nemirovsky, who analyzing the publishing activities of the USSR found that, for example, "The tasks of youth unions" by V.I. Lenin were published in a total circulation of 45,654,900 copies in Russian and translated into 65 languages of the peoples of the USSR and 27 languages of peoples of foreign countries in the years 1918-1986 11 , which is shown by our diagram - the incredible activity of the world translation community regarding the works of V.I. Lenin. In addition, it is known that in Russia, even after the collapse of the USSR, certain literature was produced in multi-million copies for example with the work of the country's first political figures, party leaders, and also works of socio-political literature that were not really required by the reading public. This literature (mainly of propaganda content) was also translated into the languages of the peoples of the USSR, and this is reflected in our diagram in a significant total number of translations of M. Gorbachev, L. Brezhnev and K. Chernenko.

The undisputable leaders of the translation industry of the end of the twentieth century in the vector "Russian English languages" are the classics of Russian literature, the writers of the 19 – 20th centuries. In Table 1 we present the names and statistics for the 10 most popular writers of the Index Translationum rating:

Table 1 10 most popular Russian writers according to Index Translationum

The classics of fiction of the 19 – 20th centuries are also translated by modern translators. Therefore, without exaggeration it may be said that works beyond time and beyond borders are the works of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev, M.A. Bulgakov14 . For example, the distinguished emigrant-translator Kirill Zinoviev, who left Russia in

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1918, in 2008 (at the time the translation of the novel was completed the translator turned 98 years old) prepared “Anna Karenina” in his translation for publication, and novels by L.N. Tolstoy "Hadji Murad" and the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "Notes from the Underground" were published his translation in 2011.

In 2015, in New York, members of the Read Russia English Translation Prize - 2015 jury members noted the resounding success of two translations of L. Tolstoy’s

“Anna Karenina” made in 2014 by wonderful translators – American translator Marian Schwartz (Yale University Press) and the Brit-

ish translator Rosamund Bartlett (Oxford University Press). The translators were awarded the special prize “Hero of Literary Translation”. As the jury noted, “The language of Tolstoy cannot become outdated for Russian readers, but the language of its first English translations may seem outdated to readers of the 21st century,” and both brilliant translations “were able to convey all the features of Tol-

stoy’s style that traditional English prose so often violates” 15 - something that for example translations of the work of C. Garnett are now being accused of.

According to Index Translationum, not only works of fiction were actively translated. We present in Table 2 the quantitative ratio of Russian authors and their area of professional knowledge, which, respectively, were of the greatest interest to the target foreign language audience - the “consumers” of this knowledge / information in the world, based on statistics of the

Index Translationum.

Table 2 Ratio "knowledge / genre of the book - the number of Russian authors" according to the Index Translationum

The high percentage of presence in the ranking of translations into the world languages of science authors in the field of natural sciences whose works were practically not translated into English (a total of 13 translated books into English are accounted for 12 authors) are noteworthy. All these authors (M.I. Moro, Yu.N. Makarychev, D.A. Epstein, I.A. Fedosov, etc. - see diagram) are the authors of textbooks, collections of tasks mainly for the school and partly for universities. Such a dissonance in the demand for authors' products in the field of the translation market can be explained by the same trends as the variation in the percentage ratio of translations of works of Soviet politicians. In the educational system of the USSR there were uniform educational standards, and accordingly a uniform educational literature, according to which all schoolchildren and students of all higher educational institutions of the country were trained, for which it was necessary to translate these textbooks into the languages of all coun-

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tries of the Soviet Union. The school system in England and the USA, as expected, did not need these textbooks.

At present, we cannot yet speak of the prosperityof Russian literature in Great Britain and the USA. The situation around the publication of translations from foreign languages into English slightly improved compared in comparison to the end of the twentieth century, when out of the total volume of printed products in these countries, the percentage of translated literature ranged from 1 to 3%. The authoritative American magazine the Publishers Weekly 16 , founded in 1895, which is also available electronically, publishes weekly various news about the English-language book industry, mostly American. The magazine covers questions about the relevance of certain authors, statistics on circulation, and also compiles reviews of various publications and works. In addition, the Publishers Weekly publishes a rating once a decade, which includes bestsellers who have achieved record sales in America. After analyzing the lists from 1990 to 2017 (27 years), we found only one non-English-speaking author in them - in 2016 one of the best books became The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho (Brazilian by nationality). This suggests that the American reading community indeed does not welcome foreign authors as warm as compatriots, America’s global publishing industry is closed to foreigners, isolated and locked up in English-language authorship, which we talked about above (the trend persists over time).

Of course, this does not mean that at present Russian literature is not translated at all by American translators. The Publishers Weekly operates the Translation Database, established in 2008 on the basis of the magazine. According to the resource, the Translation Database is a unique initiative for keeping statistics on the publication of translations of foreign-language writers and poets in the United States (translations are not taken into account in the database if they were republished during this period). The search system of the American Translation Database (which is similar in principle to that discussed by UNESCO’s Index Translationum database discussed above) provided upon request information on the number of translations that were made into English from Russian and four randomly selected European languages (data for 10 last years). Let us present for clarity these data in Table 3.

Table 3 The total number of translations into English made from the respective languages according to the Publishers Weekly magazine

The objectives of this study did not include determining the representatives of the writer's establishment of which country deserve (for various reasons) the greatest translational attention, but the information received from the Publishers Weekly makes us think about the real reasons for such inexpressive interest from the American reader, translator, or rather publishing houses, which most often are in this country sponsors of translation, to translation of works of Russian literature, which without doubt are in the same row with the brightest world writing communities.

Nevertheless, interest to our country, culture, literature remains stable and it is supported, first of all, by Russia itself, namely by the government of the Russian Federation, the Federal

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Agency for Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation (Rospechat), the Ministry of Culture and other initiative organizations.

The Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation is an authority within the structure of the Government of the Russian Federation with a wide range of functions, among which, in particular, is the development and holding of events aimed at stimulating book publishing and promoting reading. Rospechat in cooperation with the Russian World Foundation and Academia Rossica is also responsible for promoting Russian literature abroad. The Russian World Foundation has existed since 2007 and is a Russian organization that promotes the Russian language and culture in the world. Academia Rossica is a RussianBritish cultural organization whose goal is the representation of Russian culture in England. Academia has existed since 2000, and today a number of unparalleled Russian-British projects are being implemented on its basis with the support of state and cultural institutions of both countries. For example Academia Rossica together with Rospechat organizes Russian pavilions at international book fairs and represents Russian publishers and writers.

In collaboration with each other Rospechat, the Russian World Foundation and Academia Rossica support such unique projects as the Rossica Translation Prize, the Rossica Young Translators Prize, READ RUSSIA and several others. Thus, the Rossica Translation Prize, founded in 2005, is the only prize in the world for the best translation of works of Russian literature into English (READ RUSSIA, for example, presents awards for translations into any language of the world). The prize plays an important role in the promotion of Russian literature in English-speaking countries. In 2009, the Rossica Award was established for young translators - the Rossica Young Translators Prize. The prize is awarded to translators up to 25 years old and is aimed at discovering new names in the field of translation through acquaintance with Russian literature and its distribution.

Rospechat supports another non-commercial organization called the Institute of Translation, which aims to promote Russian literature throughout the world. The organization supports foreign translators and publishers who are engaged in Russian literature. The Institute of Translation organizes various events, among them, for example, the International Congress of Literary Translators, which has a wide response among Russian-speaking translators of different languages. In 2018 the Congress received guests for the fifth time, bringing together in its initiative more than 400 translators of Russian and foreign literature from 56 countries 17 . The Institute of Translation also provides grants for the translation of books by Russian authors and with its support the international project “Russian Library” was organized, which in the next 10 years will publish a hundred of the most outstanding works of Russian prose translated into the main languages of the world.

READ RUSSIA is an unprecedented global international project. The founders of this project consider the promotion of Russian literature abroad and the initiation of cooperation of Russian publishing houses with world book producers as their goal. READ RUSSIA is a prize that has been awarded every two years since 2011, when it was established by the Institute of Translation. “READ RUSSIA” is awarded in several nominations by an authoritative jury that determines the best translator (or group of translators) of a prose or poetic work from Russian into a foreign language published by a foreign publisher within last two years.

So for example in 2018 178 applications from 33 countries of the world were submitted to participate in READ RUSSIA award, and when the Organizing Committee of the prize determined the final applicants for the prize, the list of applicants was reduced to 19 translations in 12 languages. It is noteworthy that this list included two translations of works by L. Tolstoy, I. Turgenev, A. Solzhenitsyn and V. Sharov - names that will always remain for the reader a powerful source of inspiration or reflection (regardless in what language their books will be read). Therefore they will forever remain among the most sought-after classics of Russian liter-

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ature that the short list of one of the most prestigious modern awards in the field of translation proves.

It should be noted that the English language this time again became one of the four winners' languages (four - this was the number of nominations): the British translator Oliver Ready again won the category “Modern Russian Literature” with the translation of the novel “Repetitions” by Vladimir Sharov. Again, because according to the results of his previous participation in the award in 2015, the translator became the laureate for the best English translation of works of Russian literature. In 2015 O. Ready was nominated with a translation of the novel “Before and during” by V. Sharov.

Vladimir Sharov is our contemporary, deep thinker, writer and philosopher, who died in August 2018, but his works continue to live not only in the

hands of compatriots but also carry the entire depth of the author’s thoughts to Englishspeaking readers through translations by O. Ready and other masters of translation - a kind of continuation of life, the reincarnation of the ideas and feelings of the writer.

Let us turn again to the statistics from the Publishers Weekly and to the material from READ RUSSIA online 18 and analyze what other Russian authors, besides the classics and the writers already discussed, more often than others are translated into English in the last decade. On the list of the American weekly magazine

Boris Akunin and Andrei Gelasimov are represented by five translations each (maximum rate);

four editions each include works by Gaito Gazdanov and Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky;

three translations were made for works by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Shishkin, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Alexei Pehov, Viktor Pelevin.

As for READ RUSSIA online, the source adds to the listed authors such names as Zakhar

Prilepin (for obvious reasons, not in the US rating), Olga Slavnikova, Vladimir Makanin, Alexander Terekhov, Anna Starobinets, Alisa Ganieva and others. The dominance in the leaderboards of the names of modern and more often young writers, whose translations are published today in English, says that the translation fully fulfills its function of “mouthpiece”, the Eng- lish-speaking reader gets an opportunity to get acquainted with really “modern” Russia from firsthand.

Another effective means of promoting book translation is the annual book fair. As the London Book Fair organizers note, READ RUSSIA is today the largest supplier of Russian fiction in the world, and the two leading world engines in the book industry — the London Book Fair and the largest book exhibition in the USA BookExpo America — prove this. Since 2012, at the London Book Fair, READ RUSSIA has been annually introducing Russian classics and young literary names to English-speaking readers and publishers, both in English and in Russian, the original language; whereas on the American counterpart of the London Book Fair, READ RUSSIA, with state support from the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, had the opportunity to present its exhibition halls to the public (and to be popular with Expo visitors) for three years - from 2012 to 2014 as an invited guest. We believe this tradition will resume in the future. Besides political reasons, there are other reasons for restraint between US publishing houses and initiative groups promoting Russian literature in the world. So Antonina Buis called by the Publishers Weekly "the best translator from Russian into English" says directly in her articles that Americans read a lot, but at the same time read very few books by foreign authors, and A. Buis finds a number of social and psychological explanations for that. But the one thing remains clear today and does not cause doubts among scholars, writers, or ordinary readers — cultural relations between Russia, Great

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