The talk presents research that is being carried out within my current project “The Interface with the Foreign: The Soviet School of Translation, Cold War and World Literature”, funded by the Swedish Research Council. The “Soviet school of translation” was an official object of pride that has retained its high status in post-Soviet times. Regularly invoked in writings on Russian translation, it is seldom problematized. Drawing on archival sources, mainly from files pertaining to the Soviet Writers’ Union, I will provide a reconsideration of the “Soviet school of translation” from perspectives beyond its own self-understanding and official status in order to look at it as a construct with a complex history of its own.

Susanna Witt is Associate Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Research Fellow at the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her fields of interest include Russian literature, the history and culture of Russian literary translation, Russian Translation Studies, culture of the Soviet period and modern Ukrainian literature. Her recent publications include “The Shorthand of Empire: Podstrochnik Practices and the Making of Soviet Literature” (Ab Imperio, 3, 2013); “The First All-Union Conference of Translators, Moscow, 1936, and the Ideologization of Norms” (The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia, eds. Leon Burnett & Emily Lygo, Peter Lang 2013); “Between the Lines: Totalitarianism and Translation in the USSR” (Contexts, Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Brian James Baer, John Benjamins 2011).