Det skulle dröja 67 år innan de första ryssarna kunde läsa Ulysses i rysk översättning:
”The first full Russian translation of Ulysses, by Viktor Khinkis and Sergei Khoruzhy, was published in 1989. The first full Russian translation of Finnegans Wake did not see the light of day until 2021, just a few months ago.”
Det kalla kriget och de sovjetiska myndigheternas fientlighet mot experimentell litteratur, bidrog till att man höll Joyce på armlängds avstånd så länge, skriver Nataliya Karageorgos i sin recension av All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature av José Vergara:
”The epitome of Western modernism, Joyce embodied all that the literary officials found hostile to the cultural demands of the Soviet state: formalism, pessimism, individualism, complexity, naturalism. ‘A pile of dung teeming with worms, photographed with a cinema apparatus through a microscope — that’s Joyce,’ declared Karl Radek at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, a year after the US court ruled that the ban on Ulysses would be dropped.”
Att läsa Joyce kunde vara förenat med livsfara, långa straff i fångläger. Men det som är förbjudet blir också åtråvärt, skriver Karageorgos:
”José Vergara’s important new book […] presents an illuminating account of the reception of a major figure of Western modernism not as a tale of prohibitions but as the history of resistance to them.”
Ola Wihlke
BearBooks 