Title of the article:

MEN OF LETTERS OF POLISH ORIGIN AS CULTURAL MEDIATORS BETWEEN RUSSIA AND FRANCE AT THE TURN OF THE XX CENTURY: THE CASE OF T. WYŻEWSKI

Author(s):

Vadim V. Polonsky

Information about the author/authors

Vadim V. Polonsky — DSc in Philology, Professor of the RAS, A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya Str., 25 а, 121069 Moscow, Russia. E-mail: v.polonski@imli.ru

Section

Philological sciences

Year

2018

Volume

Vol. 48

Pages

Pp. 161–178

Received

January 12, 2018

Date of publication

June 15, 2018

Index UDK

821.161.1.0

Index BBK

83.3(2Рос=Рус)

Abstract

At the turn of the XX century highroad to the worldwide literary fame run through the forging of writer`s reputation in cultural capital of the then West, France. Favorable socio-political circumstances for acculturation of the Russian literature emerged there at this time. Francophone Polish immigrants from Russian Empire played vital part in facilitating of the reception of Russian literature in this country. Cultural mediation`s model they informed was to a large extent determined by the complex of “concerned alienation” towards imperial metropolitan culture. Acting as cultural mediators they came to be instrumental in penetration into Parisian literary market by Russian writers simultaneously contributing to the adapting of exotic literary “Russianness” towards conventional matrix of the “Latin conscience”. The paper looks at the study of a Polish author T. Wyżewski (French pen-name — Téodore de Wyzewa), critic, writer of the treatise “What is Art?” and translator of Tolstoy`s novel “Resurrection” as a representative example of cultural sample of this kind. The article explores aesthetic prerequisites of reduction of Tolstoy`s text by Wyzewa, bringing to the conclusion, that the Slavic author, with the reputation of respectable Parisian man of letters, seeks to attune Russian material to traditional French aesthetic canon — involuntarily contributing to the overcoming of the conservative inertia of the given canon on the part of the French writers that discarded such an experiment. Thus Polish model of the cultural mediation unintentionally reinforces tendencies of the French literary environment towards overcoming of the insularity and adapting authentic images of another nations` culture.

Keywords

Russian-French literary connections, Polish francophonie, Wyzewa, Tolstoi, literary translation, imagology, cultural mediation.

References

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