ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to present translation as a subject and an object of intercultural power struggles on the example of the first translation of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov into Polish. Authored by Barbara Beaupré, it was published in 1913 in Warsaw, a city then controlled by the Russian Empire. Numerous omissions and shifts in this text, which are believed to be a result of Russian censorship, changed Dostoyevsky's great philosophical novel into a trivial romance, a book which was therefore no longer dangerous for the imperial power. The translation was republished in 1927, already in the independent Second Republic of Poland, with a preface in which the critic Leo Belmont justifies the omissions and claims that the parts cut out would not have been of interest to the Polish readers, as they concern Orthodox Christianity, which he describes as entirely foreign to the Polish culture. This hostile attitude towards the source culture, identified with the former coloniser, turns flaws supposedly influenced by the previous political system into an advantage. Beaupré's incomplete, heavily edited translation, forgotten for many subsequent decades, has returned to readers in recent years, most probably due to the copyright lapse, which made it attractive to the publisher. This case study shows how translation can be used in subscribing to political ideas, as it enters the world literary canon or defines the national identity in opposition to the source culture. The text of translation, as well as its circulation in a given culture, is controlled by political factors which also shape the history of literature in translation.
