Charlotte Bollaert (Universiteit Gent)
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Russian fate in translation has been complex and highly changeable over time. He was first introduced to the Soviet reader as a playwright with the translation of two of his plays in 1955: La Putain Respectueuse and Nekrassov (to be republished already in 1956). Although they both form the basis for the canonization of the Russian Sartre, the selection of these plays with their respective anti-American and pro-communist thematic, the way in which they were initially translated and then performed for about a decade, led to what Gal’tsova (1999:252) describes as the “total falsification” of Sartre’s oeuvre. In 1966, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu as first translated and in 1967, Nekrassov and Le Diable et Le Bon Dieu republished, this time in a collection of seven plays, together with a retranslation of La Putain Respectueuse and four new plays (Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, Les Mouches, Morts sans Sépulture, Les Séquestrés d’Altona). A part from Sartre’s autobiography Les Mots, these seven plays were the only works by Sartre officially accessible to the Soviet reader before the Perestroika.
With the political changes induced in the 1980s and the ensuing fall of the USSR in 1991, Sartre’s other work became acceptable and he was slowly introduced as a novelist and a philosopher as well. His theatre, however, was consigned to oblivion in those years, and this for about a decade. Our hypothesis is that “Sartre as a playwright” was, regardless, of the earlier framing of his work, felt to be too closely related with the communist past to be of interest during those years. Between 1999 and 2010, however, the 1967 collection (without Nekrassov and Huis Clos) was republished at least 7 times by different publishing houses. It will be our aim to explore the stakes of non-retranslation, id est to investigate the impact of uncritically (?) reprinting Sartre’s Soviet theatre translations today and to uncover how Soviet censorship, 25 years after its abolition, continues to shape the reading of contemporary readers.