Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context is a groundbreaking work of a multi-national team of contributors whose chapters bring new perspectives to translation studies in Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet contexts. In their introduction to the volume, Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer share the history of the project and chart its goals to “address Russian literature in a global translatorial context, track[s] the migration of the Russian literary canon across all continents, and its translation into local languages over the span of one century” (7). Citing studies by Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch and referring to the methodology of translation microhistories championed by Jeremy Munday, Maguire, and McAteer establish the theoretical framework of the volume and point out the glaring lack of Russian and Soviet case studies in the western scholarship of world literary networks. To address this lack, the editors have assembled an international team of authors working on literary translation studies in global contexts. Together, volume contributors trace the history of the reception of Russian literature in different geographical and political contexts, explore its influence on various writers and literary traditions, and discuss how literary translation can serve as a tool of soft power and a means of colonization and russification. The variety of methodologies and the resistance to one straightforward narrative are clear assets of the book, allowing it to showcase the complex roles of translation agents, institutions, and reception patterns.

The volume is uniquely structured, comprising thirty-seven chapters organized geographically into four sections: Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, North and South America. Each section starts with a brief overview by one of the editors, with subsequent chapters organized alphabetically by country. The first and most detailed section is devoted to Europe. It includes sixteen chapters spanning national contexts from Catalonia, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, and Greece to Hungary, Scotland, Spain, and Ukraine. The essays feature a range of approaches: from studying the “pendulum” of reception in various linguistic and cultural contexts to exploring the legacy of translators, such as the chapter by Elizabeth Geballe devoted to Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, whose translations and an influential volume, Le Roman russe (1886), paved the way for subsequent canonization of nineteenth-century Russian prose. The essays also address various patterns of influence in the work of European authors, including Thomas Mann and Knut Hamsun, and point out instances of artistic dialogue between translation and the recipient literary tradition (Irish and Scottish poetry). The chapter on Ukraine by Lada Kolomiyets and Oleksandr Kalnychenko explores more sinister aspects of translation, revealing various strategies of censorship and control not only in institutional structures but also in the translation repertoire and stylistic choices, including literalism and the excessive use of Russian as an intermediary language, which led to suppression of more independent voices among Ukrainian translators (311).

Three chapters address hitherto underexplored contexts in Africa and the Middle East. Nikolay Steblin-Kamensky analyzes the work of Progress publishing house and focuses on translations to and from Amharic as a tool of political propaganda and the growth of Soviet influence in the region during the Cold War decades. The other chapters in this section explore the reception of Maksim Gor´kii’s prose in Angola and in the Arab-speaking countries more generally. Though Gor´kii’s name in Soviet-era translations is unsurprising, the extent of his influence on literary traditions and celebrated authors, such as Egyptian novelists Khairy Shalaby and Albert Cossery, is remarkable, as Sarali Ginsburg’s illuminating study suggests.

The following thirteen chapters survey translations of Russian literature in Asia, spanning China, Japan, India, Mongolia, Vietnam, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The five-chapter cluster on India highlights the country’s multilingualism through analyzing Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu translations. These chapters examine colonial and post-colonial contexts and focus on Lev Tolstoi’s reception. Other chapters offer close readings of translation stylistics, such as innovative linguistic changes in rendering the past tense in Hiroko Cockerill’s analysis of Japanese translations of Fedor Dostoevskii or Zaya Vandan’s discussion of cultural adaptation of epithets with religious symbolism in Mongolian renditions of his works. Chapters devoted to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan add to the growing body of work on the Soviet-era ideology of translation, highlighting the biographies and translation practices of Kazakh and Uzbek translators and questioning the “unequal cultural transfers” in translation (525).

The final section, devoted to the Americas, contains five chapters that feature thought-provoking surveys of reception (Brazil, Mexico, Cuba) and relative lack of interest (Colombia), with close attention to socio-political circumstances, cultural institutions, and influential translators, as well as the contemporary US literary market and the reception of Russophone Ukrainian literature before the start of the full-scale war in 2022. These chapters present a general overview of translation history, offering compelling statistics on the fluctuating waves of reception and highlighting the legacy of authors (such as the celebrated Mexican writer Sergio Pitol), scholars, and translators who contributed to the reception of Russian literature. Moreover, Damaris Puñales-Alpízar shows the imprint of translation on cultural imagination by invoking two Cuban feature films with translator protagonists (615–16). The volume concludes with Maguire’s chapter “Russian Literature in the Anglophone Nations: An Overview.” Harkening back to the earliest translations of Russian poetry into English at the end of the eighteenth century and tracing the “discovery, canonization, and altruism” in the reception of Russian literature, Maguire surmises that the latter model, with translations rendering “the voice of a writer who has been creatively silenced or even physically threatened in Russia” (682), may be only viable in the face of the changing geopolitical situation. The appendix to the volume offers a select bibliography of titles on the reception of Russian literature in various national contexts—another asset of the project.

In summary, it is challenging to fully acknowledge the contributions of the many outstanding scholars featured in this volume. Fortunately, this collection is available in open access, allowing readers to explore various cultural contexts, reception histories, and the remarkable lives of translators who enable these international exchanges.