The Fearful Steelpen

"Kamovnikova's chronicle of the translators' lives and her analysis of the translations themselves are both convincing and intriguing, while the extensions to the present day demonstrate the ongoing significance of the themes and issues raised throughout the book."-Jose Vergara, author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature "Kamovnikova provides a valuable reading of Ulysses's content and its reception in the 1920s Soviet Union, as well as an extremely interesting look at Sergei Eisenstein. In addition to the substantial work in cataloging and describing translations, The Fearful Steelpen offers an intriguing and well contextualized discussion on the connection of Ulysses to psychoanalysis and formalism and makes strong points about the piecemeal and selective nature of the translations and the political motivations for those choices."-Jon Stone, author of The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism

Examining how a single book inspired devotion, dread, and lasting superstition in Russian letters When James Joyce first published Ulysses in 1922, the book enjoyed a hearty welcome in the Soviet Union. In fact, Russian was the second language into which excerpts were translated. However, the early enthusiasm soon gave way to apprehension, and then to public condemnation. The Russian literary community found itself at the epicenter of the political repression of the 1930s, suffering enormous losses among writers and translators, who died en masse through executions and exile. In the context of Ulysses, the numerous violent deaths of its Soviet translators and editors gave rise to rumors, which then developed into superstitious beliefs that managed to outlive their own time. Russian translation scholar Natalia Kamovnikova examines the struggles faced by those who attempted early translations, including death and imprisonment, and how both this translation work and the text itself became sources of fear. Alongside important background on these early translation attempts, including information on the translators themselves, The Fearful Steelpen unpacks the literary approaches to rendering Joyce's aesthetics in Russian and traces the socio-political beliefs behind translation and publishing decisions. Kamovnikova goes further, to examine why Ulysses in particular aroused fears in both in its contemporaries and in subsequent generations of Russian writers, as if the text held a dangerous power that could harm those working on it. This fascinating publishing case study reveals the complicated cultural and political dynamics at work behind a seemingly simple translation from one language to another that still resonates in the contemporary moment.