ABSTRACT
Wit [Gore ot uma] could have been translated without significant loss in its own right, but where can a translator be found who has the strength to undertake such a difficult job? The same could be said about Pushkin and Lermontov: They must be translated in verse. But what talent the translator would need! At the same time, the originality of these poets cannot evoke in foreigners the total interest in their originality that they do in Russians. Let their works appear in better translations, then foreigners would not see them as imitators of their own poets and could not fail to see the originality and uniqueness in them; but they would see originality and uniqueness in them more than talent or even nationality. Take any European poet, not even one of the finest, and you’ll immediately see what his nationality is. Take a French, English, German, or Italian poet; each of them is as sharply different from the others as are their native lands. This clear difference in nationality is what was lacking in Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s best works, even those that were excellently translated into foreign languages. In this regard, Gogol is an absolute exception to the general rule. As primarily an artist of everday life and prosaic reality, he cannot fail to capture the full interest of foreigners in his national originality. In his works everything is specifically and purely Russian. There is not a single feature that would remind the foreigner of any European poet.
