University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2015-07-10 Sex, Lies, and Red Tape: Ideological and Political Barriers in Soviet Translation of Cold War American Satire, 1964-1988 Khmelnitsky, Michael Khmelnitsky, M. (2015). Sex, Lies, and Red Tape: Ideological and Political Barriers in Soviet Translation of Cold War American Satire, 1964-1988 (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27766 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/2348 doctoral thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca Allegorie der Übersetzung (2015) Michael G. Khmelnitsky acrylic on canvas (30.4 cm x 30.4 cm) The private collection of Dr. Hollie Adams. M. G. Khmelnitsky ALLEGORY OF TRANSLATION IB №281 A 00276 Sent to typesetting 17.II.15. Signed for printing 20.II.15. Format 12x12. Linen canvas. Order №14. Print run 1. Price 3,119 r. 3 k. Publishing House «Soiuzmedkot» Calgary UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Sex, Lies, and Red Tape: Ideological and Political Barriers in Soviet Translation of Cold War American Satire, 1964-1988 by Michael Khmelnitsky A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH CALGARY, ALBERTA JULY, 2015 © Michael Khmelnitsky 2015 Abstract My thesis investigates the various ideological and political forces that placed pressures on cultural producers, specifically translators in the U.S.S.R., during the Era of Stagnation (1964- 1988). In Chapter 1, I examine Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut’s use of black humour and their reception in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R, describe my personal encounter with Soviet translations of the two authors’ texts, outline the current critical debates, and examine Western reactions to the Soviet translations. In Chapter 2, I contrast tsarist and Soviet censorship and U.S. and Soviet censure of undesirable works, describe the creation and operation of Voenizdat, Glavlit, Goskomizdat, and the resulting Kafkaesque culture-producing machine, identify the problem of sex in Russian and Soviet literature, discuss the problems of Soviet book production in relation to Heller and Vonnegut’s works, analyze the censorial peritexts of their novels, assess the means of resistance to Soviet state publishing (including samizdat, tamizdat, Aesopian language, and pseudotranslation), and discuss the death of the original. In Chapter 3, I provide a brief overview of Russian translation theory in the 1800s, outline the development of the schools and movements of Russian and Soviet translation studies, appraise Ivan Kashkin’s role in the incorporation of the principles of socialist realism into Soviet translation theory, outline the schools and movements of Western translation studies, appraise Lawrence Venuti’s role in the incorporation of the principles of visibility, resistancy, and foreignization into Western translation theory, and provide a set of best practices for reading and evaluating a translation. In Chapter 4, I test various translators’ complicity with the Soviet system by comparing the lexical, semantic, and idiomatic equivalence of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions and their translations by Rita Rait, and perform a thought experiment by disregarding the original text of Heller’s Catch-22 and comparing five of its Russian translations (by three different translators) to each other. In Chapter 5, I examine the regression of post- Soviet translation studies to former positions, trace its future developments, provide examples of effective translations and original texts that employ strategies conducive to such translations, and weigh the question of canon in relation to the production of new translated texts. ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the following individuals: my parents, for showing me what to read—my father Gregory, for bearing with my endless e-mails and late- night phone calls, and for being an untiring and invaluable opponent and partner in a myriad of debates—and my mother Ludmila, for her help with clarifying the fine points of the Russian language; at Sir Winston Churchill Secondary, Muriel Densford, Lynda Matthews, and Geoff Gabbott, for showing me how to read, for giving me English, World War II history, and thinking out of the box, and for bearing with my endless in-class questions and comments; at Langara College, Don Wood, Raoul Grossman, and Noel Currie, for giving me American literature, Cold War history, and close reading and research skills; at UBC, Kieran Kealy, Lee Johnson, and Stephen Guy-Bray, for giving me Chaucer, the Romantics, intertextuality, and for showing me how to read between the lines; in Japan, Pat Blouin, for teaching me how to be a teacher and how to survive, and for telling me to go to graduate school that night in Tokyo at the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world; at UWaterloo, Victoria Lamont, Jay Dolmage, and David Williams, for listening to me, and for showing me how to write better; at UCalgary, Michael Ullyot, David Oakleaf, and Murray McGillivray, for many insights into textual production and cultural materialism; Harry Vandervlist, Jason Wiens, and Adrienne Kertzer, for many insights into teaching; Jon Kertzer and Nick Žekulin, for their infinite wisdom, patience, and humour, and for giving me the opportunity to show the impossible; Michael Clarke, Shaobo Xie, Alexander Hill, and Mikhail Gronas, for giving me the opportunity to tell the impossible; at the TFDL, Judy Zhao, Kathleen James, and Glenda Magallon at Interlibrary Loans and Document Delivery Services, Ji Zhao at Microforms, and Rosvita Vaska at Libguides, for helping me find the unfindable; on the Internet, Konstantin Kalmyk, Aleksei L’vov, Alexandra Borisenko, Andrei Azov, David Stone, Sergei Kalmykov, and Max Nemtsov, for helping me answer the unanswerable; at SAP, Tony Strangis, Alex Tusa, Sean McGregor, and the Vancouver documentation team for helping me put food on my table and clothes on my back; in Vancouver, Derek Choy, Matthew Leung, and Edgar Lam, for all the sanity; in Mississauga and Luxembourg, Budapest and Poznań, Paul Samotik and Blazej Krukowski, for all the insanity; in Calgary, Rod Moody-Corbett, Jess Nicol, Hollie Adams, and Brian Jansen, for their friendship and support; in Kiev and now by my side, Olga Sviatchenko, for loving me no matter what. iii Dedication To all those who were deceived iv Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v List of Tables ............................................................................................................................... viii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ ix List of Abbreviations ..................................................................................................................... ix Epigraph ........................................................................................................................................ xii Foreword ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 The Polite Bear on the Typewriter: Reception of American Authors in the U.S.S.R. ................... 7 In the Beginning was the Empire ................................................................................................ 7 Enemy of my Friend .................................................................................................................. 11 Paint it Black ............................................................................................................................. 15 Against the Dying of the Light .................................................................................................. 20 Enemy of My Enemy ................................................................................................................ 28 The Star and Death of Titov and Vilenskii ............................................................................... 38 A Friend at Any Cost ................................................................................................................ 49 Manure for Flowers or Putrid Bullshit? .................................................................................... 58 God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut .................................................................................................. 62 Back in the U.S.S.R. .................................................................................................................