ABSTRACT
They have introduced into our literature a type of poetry previously little known in Russia, one that portrayed the poverty and suffering of the working class. Among such poet-translators, Mr. Kurochkin has attained more fame in Russia than the others. Wielding a light, flexible, and melodious verse, Mr. Kurochkin has dedicated himself primarily to translation and to altering the songs of [Pierre-Jean de] Béranger to fit our Russian ways. While often preserving the spirit of the original, he is able, very cleverly, to apply various couplets of Béranger to our contemporary circumstances, so that Béranger is essentially nothing more than an unwitting weapon, and under the protection of his name, Mr. Kurochkin pursues his own goals. For example, everyone knows how biased the view of our periodicals is in regard to the treatment of the folk by our noble class. Mr. Kurochkin, who is one of the persecutors of the upper classes of our society, translated a famous work by Béranger, ‘Le Marquis de Carabas’, in which, incidentally, one can find the following verses:
N ikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a prose writer and dramatist. His literary success came with a series of tales Evenings on a Farm near Dikan’ka [Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki],
tage, Ukrainian themes were further developed in Mirgorod (1835), a collection of stories which represent a mixture of the heroic and the grotesque. These earlier works, alongside his best known short stories The Nose [Nos, 1836], The Overcoat [Shinel’,1842], his novel Dead Souls [Mertvye dushi, 1842], and his play The Government Inspector [Revizor,1836], were translated into English by Constance Garnett and published in London between 1922 and 1927 as part of the six volumes of the writer’s Collected Works. Gogol’s translation activities were limited to his collaboration on the Russian version of Molière’s Sganarelle (1839) and to some minor editing of previously translated plays. His comments on translated literature are expressed in several articles and in his letters. In his 1846 article, ‘On the Odyssey Translated by Zhukovskii’, Gogol uses the Russian translation of the epic to compare Homer’s patriarchal view of the world with socially charged, progressive literature in Russia. It was published as part of the collection of his essays and letters under the general title Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends [Vybrannye mesta iz perepiski s druz’iami, 1847].
