The reception of H.C. Andersen in Russia

Abstract

The article deals with some aspects of Hans Christian Andersen’s reception in Russia and primarily with translation of his fairy tales. Anna and Peter Hansen’s translations made in the end of the 19th century are still the ones mostly published. The reception of Н.С. Andersen’s fairy tales has been changing depending on the epoch and its demands, but we argue that there is kind of an “invariant core” in different versions of translations. We present both extra-linguistic and linguistic approaches to reception and analyze Hans Christian Andersen translations in Russia in the context of literary reception and on the ground of documents dating back to the Soviet epoch, critical articles about the children’s literature in the Soviet Union as well as on the ground of the comparative analysis of translations of his fairy tales published after the revolution of 1917. We argue that the issue of changes in H.C. Andersen’s texts in the Soviet Union is closely related to the history of self-censorship. The paper also investigates specific features of translation, which are essential elements in a text reception, as well as peculiarities of different translation methods used by Anna Hansen and modern translators.