Discussion Group: Laurence Sterne and Early Soviet Translators: Drafts, Notes, and Digressions
This talk examines early Soviet translations into Russian of the works of Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), the author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. The talk approaches Sterne's prose, so far removed from the dominant aesthetic norms of the Soviet period, as an unusual resource for thinking about the institutional and everyday practices of translation in Soviet society after the Revolution and during the first decade of Stalinism. Why was Sterne read and translated so intensively in the early Soviet period, to an extent unmatched since his works first arrived in the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century? Four editions of his works appeared in Soviet Russia between 1922 and 1940, several new translations were produced, some of which still remain unpublished. The lecture focuses on the archival papers of two translators working on Sterne's texts during the years of the Stalinist Great Terror: Gustav Shpet (1879-1937) and Adrian Frankovskii (1888-1942). Both translators were erudite philosophers who turned to literary translation in the years after the Revolution, when philosophical thought outside officially sanctioned, party-minded Marxism was increasingly suppressed, and when the translation of literary classics offered one of the remaining spaces for relative intellectual autonomy.
Shpet, Russia's leading proponent of phenomenology and hermeneutics and a student of Edmund Husserl, read Sterne as a conscious anachronism, a writer who escapes his own time. His partial translation of Tristram Shandy, carried out largely in 1934 and interrupted by Shpet's arrest and exile to Siberia in 1935, approaches Sterne as a continuation of the early modern comic tradition. In Shpet's reading, Sterne's digressiveness is treated not as stylistic eccentricity but as a reflection of a conscious biographical strategy. Frankovskii, who translated Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey, as well as Sterne's letters and autobiographical writings, sought to create a translation that would synchronise Sterne with modern analytical Russian prose, while remaining acutely attentive to Sterne's earlier Russian reception. His sustained interest in the art and thought of high modernism (before turning to eighteenth-century English prose he translated Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson; he was also the first translator of Franz Kafka into Russian) intensified his attention to the temporal organization of Sterne's narrative and, in particular, to Sterne's engagement with John Locke's psychological theories.
Drawing on draft translations, handwritten notes, and materials prepared for annotations and introductions, the talk examines the particular difficulties posed by Sterne's learned literary play, winding sentences, and intrusive narratorial presence, while thinking about translation as a biographical strategy adopted by intellectuals working under conditions of repression.
Peter Budrin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He received his doctorate in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and, prior to joining Queen Mary, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. His work has appeared in The Slavic and East European Journal (SEEJ), The Shandean, as well as in other journals and edited volumes. In 2022, he co-edited a special issue of SEEJ on early Soviet translations of English literature. His research interests include Soviet intellectual history, book history, translation studies, and eighteenth-century literature. His book, Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2026.
