ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide the more insight into how the (Soviet) Russian literary world dealt with the shortage of children's literature. It explores how the attitude toward translated, classic works of foreign adventure fiction (AF) evolved in the last decades of the twentieth century under the pressure of not only aesthetic but also ideological and economic constraints. The chapter includes a survey of Russian translations, retranslations, and re-editions of eight Western giants of adventure fiction in order to uncover traces of two important forces of patronage in Soviet and post-Soviet-Russian culture: ideology and business. The translation policy toward foreign AF was significant for the relative tolerance that the Soviet regime exhibited regarding famous literary works from abroad. This partly explains why so many talented writers in the Soviet Union did not participate in the creation of a socialist-realist literature, engaging instead in the process of literary translation.
