A Club’s “World Literature”. The Work in a Unique Publishing House Through Its Staff’s Albums

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Abstract:
“World Literature” (1918–1924) was not just a publishing house and a center for the development of the theory and practice of literary translation, but also a kind of club or cultural circle where writers of different generations and views had the opportunity to receive material support during the difficult time of the Russian Civil War, to organize public events, and simply to communicate in an informal setting. In addition to letters, diaries, and memoirs, the staff of “World Literature” devoted to its work a considerable number of texts “for internal use” where the everyday life of the publishing house was played out in a humorous, partly parodic way. Various representatives of the Petrograd intelligentsia, in one way or another connected with the publishing house, wrote prose and poetry texts to each other’s albums, or prepared them for corporate parties. In this paper, we aim to show how these “unofficial” pages, sometimes of a rather high literary lev- el, reflect the work in the publishing house and make us understand the original appropriation and adaptation of different texts of foreign literatures which were being translated into Russian at that time. In addition, the characteristic features of these texts can be compared with the aesthetics of nineteenth-century Russian albums.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22455/CM.2949-0510-2025-6-379-399
EDN:
https://elibrary.ru/ROZLRV
Author: Francesca Lazzarin
About the author: Francesca Lazzarin, PhD, Research Fellow, Università degli Studi di Udine, Via Tarcisio Petracco 8, 33100 Udine, Italy. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4190-0501 E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Received: December 4, 2024
Date of Publication: March 12, 2025
Approved after reviewing : November 11, 2025
Publication Type: Research Article
For citation: Lazzarin, F. “A Club’s ‘World Literature’. The Work in a Unique Publishing House Through Its Staff’s Albums.” Codex manuscriptus, issue 6. Moscow, IWL RAS Publ., 2025, pp. 379–399. (In Russian) https://doi.org/10.22455/CM.2949-0510-2025-6-379-399
Keywords: 20 century, Petrograd, literary environment, “World literature”, manuscript albums, literary translation.

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