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Alice's New Adventures
The story of how Lewis Carroll's masterpiece came to the Soviet Union is almost as strange as the book itself.
Earlier this year, the world celebrated the 175th
anniversary of the birth of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known
under his pen name, Lewis Carroll. Virtually anyone who loves books can
tell you that Carroll is the author of "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland," a masterpiece of children's literature that has been
translated into more than 100 languages, including Russian.
But
few people know the story of how "Alice" appeared in Russia -- a
fantastic tale with several twists and turns that are almost as absurd
as the book itself.
"Alice" first came out in Russian nearly 130
years ago, but back then, it seemed the book would not fare well here.
The anonymously translated version of 1879 was met with confusion and
bewilderment. "Tiring, most boring, most confused sick delusions of a
little girl"; "absurd dreams may be recounted in a family circle for
fun, but they are not published, illustrated and presented to the
general public"; "one can hardly imagine anything less sensible and
more absurd than this fairy tale; all mothers are urged to disregard
this worthless fantasy" -- such was the critical consensus in Russia at
the time.
The
absurd world of Lewis Carroll, which immediately fascinated readers in
Britain, was quite alien to readers elsewhere. Moreover, children's
literature in Russia at the time tended to be extremely moralistic and
plot-based, and Carroll's wild imagination did not fit in. As time went
by, several new translations of "Alice" appeared; one of them (frankly,
a bad one) was done by the young Vladimir Nabokov. But for almost a
century, "Alice" was not a household name to Russians, even though
translators tried their best to replace obscure English hints and
poetic phrasings with more accessible Russian ones.
By the late 1960s, the background for a Carroll revival
was ripe. There had been plenty of children's poetry written in the
nonsense manner (or translated into Russian from other languages) so
the genre was no longer shocking to readers. Furthermore, Soviet life
itself was increasingly absurd -- and though absurdism was not
officially encouraged in literature for adults, readers had softened to
it.
That was when a strange, completely Carrollian thing happened. [. . . .
.]