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E.E. Tchougounova-Paulson (Cambridge, England)
CHRONOLOGY OF THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF ALEXANDER BLOK'S WORKS: HISTORY AND MODERNITY
Abstract. The history of English translations of Alexander Blok's poetry and prose (primarily the former, but interest in the latter is increasing nowadays) covers a lengthy and colourful period of nearly 100 years, beginning when the poet was still alive. In case with Blok's works there are two main sources for translations into English: the first (and the richest) is represented by native English speakers (and among them are multitudinous professional literary workers, such as poets, literary journalists etc.) and the second relies on Russian immigrants (White émigrés and later) involved in the literary process, living in the UK, the US or elsewhere outside Russia. Although the first attempts at translating Blok's poetry for the Western audience were not very successful, the actual work never fully died away, but rather diminished, for a variety of reasons (primarily non-literary). As a literary figure, Blok is not so vividly recognisable in the West as he might be: although his works are gloriously famous inside Russia, he is not a common subject for academic research. Partly, the problem lies inside the difficulty of translating his works, because they are complex, overpowered by the Symbolist philosophy and stylistically exquisite. But despite that, professional translators continue their efforts, and our main aim in this paper is to show the most significant of them, to systematise and to reveal which ones can be identified as the closest to the original, and widely quoted.
Key words: Alexander Blok; English translations; The Twelve; stanza.
Е.Е. Чугунова-Полсон (Кембридж, Великобритания)
Хронология английских переводов Александра Блока: история и современность
Аннотация. История английских переводов поэзии и прозы Александра Блока (поэзии в первую очередь, но за последние десятилетия возрос интерес и к блоковской публицистике) охватывает длительный период почти в 100 лет, начавшийся еще при жизни поэта. Всех блоковских переводчиков на английский можно условно разделить на две группы: первая, и самая обширная, представлена собственно носителями английского языка - поэтами, публицистами литературных изданий и т.д., а вторая опирается на русскую эмиграцию разных лет (белое движение, советская и постсоветская волны), авторов, вовлеченных в литературный процесс и проживающих в Великобритании, США или других странах за пределами России. Хотя первые попытки перевести поэзию Блока для западной аудитории нельзя назвать очень успешными, переводческая работа над блоковскими текстами никогда не прерывалась, а скорее затихала на время по ряду причин (чаще всего не литературного характера). К сожалению, Блок
не так хорошо известен на Западе, как хотелось бы и как он, безусловно, того заслуживает: блоковская поэзия не входит в традиционную для западных славистов базовую академическую программу. Главным образом, проблема заключается в трудности перевода его поэтического языка, потому что он невероятно сложен, пронизан символистской философией и стилистически прихотлив. Но несмотря на это, профессиональные переводчики не оставляют своих усилий, и цель нашей статьи - показать наиболее значимые образцы их работ, по возможности их систематизировать и выявить, какие из них могут быть определены как наиболее близкие к оригиналу и широко цитируемые.
Ключевые слова: Александр Блок; английские переводы; поэма «Двенадцать»; строфа.
English translations of Alexander Blok's works have a long history. Unlike the classics from the "golden era" of 19th century Russian literature (Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), interest in the poetry and prose of Russian fin de siècle (Silver Age) and then early Soviet literature has always been sporadic rather than constant and coherent (in case of the Soviet literature of the 20s -early 30s, the situation has drastically changed in regard to the new wave of interest in the Russian formalists). In our paper, we want to make an attempt to systematize these multiple translations of Blok's works (not all of them, of course, but only some of them) and to reveal which ones can be identified as the closest to the original, also the most successful, and widely quoted by the Western academics whose subject is the Russian literature of the early 20th century.
As the main Blok scholar in Britain, Avril Pyman, has noted, «...кроме двух случайных переводов, попавших в один из первых сборников русской поэзии, вышедших тоже случайно в 1917 г., всерьез начали переводить Блока с конца, а не с начала его творческого пути. Начали с "Двенадцати" и со "Скифов". С. Бехофер, первый переводчик "Двенадцати", издал свою работу в 1920 г. со своим предисловием и с иллюстрациями Михаила Ларионова" [".apart from two random Blok poems that were published in one of the first collections of Russian poetry by occasion in 1917, the main move on translations of his works seriously began from the end and not from the beginning of his literary life. It has been started from "The Twelve" and "The Scythians". C. Bechofer, the first translator of "The Twelve," published it in 1920 with his introduction and illustrations made by Mikhail Larionov"] [Пайман / Pyman 1993, 364].
We should also acknowledge that there have always been two main sources for Blok's translations into English:
• the first (and the widest) is connected with native English speakers (professional literary workers: poets, literary journalists etc.);
• and the second relies on Russian immigrants (white émigrés and later) involved in the literary process, living in the UK, the US or elsewhere outside Russia.
We have to make a disclaimer that in the first part of our talk we will be
referring quite a few times to Avril Pyman's work "Alexander Blok in English and American literary studies" ("Блок в английском и американском литературоведении"), which she wrote for the fifth book of volume 92 of "Литературное наследство" ("The Literary Heritage") back in the early nineties, but is still a relevant source for Blok researchers. Pyman gives an excellent chronology of what could be regarded as early Western studies of Blok's works, with the translations of his poems, including The Twelve. As it turns out, the very first English translator of "two random Blok poems that were published in one of the first collections of Russian poetry" was an English writer of Jewish origin, Paul (Percy) Selver (1888-1970), best known as a translator of Czech literature and Karel Capek in particular. Selver spoke a few Slavonic languages, and Russian was amongst them. In 1917, he edited the anthology "Modern Russian poetry: texts and translations" (London & New York: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & co., 1917), a short collection of works of Russian Silver age poets, such as Vl. Solovyov, K. Balmont, V. Bryusov, Zinaida Gippius, F. Sologub. The introduction to the edition is quite amusing: Selver attributes brief characteristics to all the referred writers, connecting them to the Western literary canon, and Blok is no exception: "There is, for example, Alexander Block, whose verses are distinguished by their devout and austere tone; the search for unattained ideal is often expressed in the symbolism of mediaeval chivalry" [Modern Russian poetry... 1917, XV].
It is not exactly clear why Selver chose two of Blok's poems - one from 1903 ("День был нежно-серый..."), the other from 1906 ("Вербочки"), but here they are - "Tender grey the day was..." and "The Willow-Boughs". Selver does his best to preserve the metre and rhyme of every stanza in both translations, but it is a hard task. Supposedly that is why he made two footnotes: in the first he said that "It was found impossible to reproduce quite closely the fluctuating rhythm of the original" [Modern Russian poetry... 1917, 17] and in the second "It is almost impossible to reproduce in English rhyme the delicate simplicity of the original, with its diminutives and the tripping melody of its metre" [Modern Russian poetry... 1917, 19]. In "Tender grey the day was." Selver uses enjambement in the first stanza and an inverted order, as it was in the original; both work smoothly:
Tender-grey the day was, grey as sorrow and Pallid grew the evening like a woman's hand [Modern Russian poetry... 1917, 17].
Interestingly, in "The Willow-Boughs", Selver translates Russian diminutives "мальчики и девочки" with the informal "lads and lasses" and somehow it subtly conveys the same idea of fair youth:
Lads and lasses gathering, Willow-boughs and tapers bring, That they homeward bear [Modern Russian poetry... 1917, 19].
In general, the very first known translations of these two of Blok's pieces can be considered to be fairly accurate, although they had not yet made any major progress on introducing Blok's works to the Western audience; there was much more to come.
It is not surprising that after the October Revolution and its overwhelming influence on Russia and overseas, "The Twelve" quickly became the most popular object for translating, and a considerable amount of effort was dedicated to it in the UK as well as in the States. Two American translators, a family couple, the writer and critic Babette Deutsch (1895-1982) and her husband, Avrahm (Abraham) Yarmolinsky (1890-1975), prepared one of them; the translation was first published in 1920 in New York. Avril Pyman described it as "... выполненный более профессионально, хотя все еще далекий от оригинала и от приемлемого уровня английской поэтики, этот перевод неоднократно переиздавался" [".made much more professional, but still being very far from the original and from a decent level of English poetics, this translation has been repeatedly republished"] [Пайман / Pyman 1993, 364].
This particular translation does not give us this impression: the authors tried to be as close as possible to the actual subject, i.e. the mayhem of the first revolutionary days as depicted by Blok. They revealed their reflections on the main theme in the introduction to the translation: "The Twelve" at once bears witness to a revolution in literature, and to the literature of the revolution. <.> The issue of upheaval and disaster, it is the creation of a man bewildered in a broken world, seeing it with all the emotional intensity of the artist, and drawing out of it, rather than imposing upon it, the order of his mystical apprehension. One finds therein, if with difficulty, traces of Blok's earlier styles. But it is like finding in a face wrought upon by time and grief the expressions habitual to its young contours" [Blok 1920, iii].
If we take a glance at the first chapter of the current translation, we spot a slight extensiveness in the first stanza that doesn't exist in the original. Instead of giving the reader a metaphorically concise, simple and graphic description of the original (черный вечер - белый снег), Deutsch-Yarmolinsky use an extra adjective, and it does not ruin the mythopoeic chronicling of the plot, but helps the reader to observe the full narrative:
Black evening.
Stark white snow.
The winds, the winds
They leap to overflow -
The winds, the winds!
Through God's dark world they blow!
[Blok 1920, 7].
Further in her summary of Blok studies, Pyman mentioned two authors: Frances Cornford (1886-1960) and Esther Polianovsky-Salaman (19001995), and we decided to take a more detailed look at their joint work on
Blok's poetry. Before we begin with our observation, we should make a subtle correction to the forename of the first author in this pair: unlike her husband, Francis Cornford, who was also a translator and a classical scholar, she was Frances, and because of the similarity of their names, he was known to family, friends and colleagues as "FMC" and she as "FCC". Frances Cornford was a poet, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and a famous Cambridge local. Here, in Cambridge in the 30s, she met Esther Polianovsky, a physicist, translator and writer, who left post-revolutionary Russia in 1919 and also settled in Cambridge (she worked in the Cavendish laboratory alongside with her husband, physicist Meyer Head Salaman). Together, they created an anthology entitled "Poems from the Russian", which was released in 1943 and included a few translations of Blok's writings, as such as "Девушка пела в церковном хоре", "Коршун", "Незнакомка", "Поздней осенью из гавани", "Рожденные в года глухие", "Сусальный ангел", "Сын и мать". We agree with Pyman, who calls the Cornford/Polianovsky-Salaman work ".едва ли не первыми высокопоэтическими и сохраняющими близость к оригиналу переводами Блока <...> Английские слова, послушные поэту, как будто сами складываются в звучные естественные словосочетания, отражающие образы оригинала" [".essentially the first highly poetic and strikingly resembling to the original translations of Blok <.> It looks like English words obedient to a poet, build themselves into resonant and natural phrases that are reflecting images of the original"] [Пайман / Pyman 1993, 364-365].
We think that Cornford-Polianovsky-Salaman's translation of Blok's poem "Сын и мать" ("Son and Mother") is one of the best translations of this particular text: it does indeed look (and sound, if read aloud) like a classical English text, and in this case it can be regarded as faithful to Blok's integral metaphoric language:
I planted my bright Paradise And hid it with a paling tall; Through azure air for her dear son I heard my mother cry and call:
Dear son, where are you? No reply, The light above my palisade Is slowly turning richly ripe The secret vineyard I have made [Poems from the Russian 1943, 59].
The Cornford-Polianovsky-Salaman version of Blok's poem "The Hawk" is written with iambic pentameter, and it perfectly conveys the mournful tune of the original (also created in iamb, but with a different structure):
Over the empty fields a black hawk hovers, And circle after circle smoothly weaves.
In the poor hut, over her son in the cradle, A mother grieves:
There, suck my breast: there, grow and eat our bread, And learn to bear your cross and bow your head [Poems from the Russian 1943, 53].
Like Blok's in the original, Cornford-Polianovsky-Salaman's translation begins with a meditative, nearly dormant stanza, which makes the actual transition from the bleak yet quiet and dreamy landscape to the portrayal of a grieving and desperate mother even more sudden and dramatic. The similar dreaminess and seamlessness of the poem "Девушка пела в церковном хоре" has been preserved by Cornford-Polianovsky-Salaman in their translation:
In the cathedral choir a girl stood singing Of all the weary on an alien shore, Of all ships gone to sea, and of all people Who can remember happiness no more.
Her voice went soaring in the cupola, And, listening in the darkness, everyone Saw how the sunlight touched her on the shoulder, And how her white dress sang in a shaft of sun [Пайман / Pyman 1993, 365].
If we now compare this translation with the next one, made by Maurice Bowra (1898-1971) at approximately the same time (the middle 40s), we can notice a remarkable difference between them: Bowra's version, albeit precise, seems to lose a significant part of the poetic Zeitgeist:
A maiden's song in the choir was telling Of all who in far-off countries fret. Of all ships that sail upon waters swelling, Of all who their happiness forget.
So sang her voice, in the great dome soaring; On her pale white shoulders the gleam was bright. And everyone in the dimness hearing Saw a pale dress sing in the gleaming light [A Book of Russian Verse 1943, 97].
Bowra's style looks more academic, and it is no wonder: he was not only a classical British scholar, but also Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford in the early 50s. Bowra's editions of Russian verse have been republished a few times, and his translations of Blok's poems can be regarded as widely known. However, could it possibly
make them iconic? It is highly unlikely: we cannot but agree with the literary critic G. Grigson (Pyman quotes him in her review), who pointed out "the lack of originality" [Grigson 1979, 677] in the vast majority of translations of Blok's poetry, taking into account Bowra's work as well.
We shall not comment on Pyman's own translations [Pyman 1979, 1980] of Blok's writings, because they deserve a separate - and thorough - analysis as we plan to return to the subject a bit later.
Our brief review of Blok translations made in the 20th century would not be complete without mentioning the work of F.D. Reeve (1928-2013), a prominent American academic, editor, writer and poet. As Pyman says about him, "подход Рива, профессионала-переводчика, поэта и литературоведа, скорее аналитический, чем просветительский. Он не рассказывает о Блоке, как это делает Киш, а рассматривает стихи, толкует их. Рив адресует книгу читателю, знающему русский язык. Поэтому он дает как приложение текст "Двенадцати" без перевода" ["Reeve's method, and he is a professional translator, poet and literary scholar, is rather analytical than educational. Unlike Kisch, he does not talk about Blok, but analyses verses, interprets them. Reeve addresses his book to a reader who speaks Russian. That is why he gives the text of The Twelve in appendix, without a translation"] [Пайман / Pyman 1993, 369].
We would say that Reeve's translations of Blok give to the English speaking audience a more pluralistic and vivid idea of what Blok as a prominent poet was for Russian public life in the fin de siècle era and later, in the revolutionary time. We think that Reeve's translation of Blok's "Пляски смерти" is a definite success: dance macabre and humane reflections are perfectly woven together.
How difficult for a dead man to pretend
To be alive and full of passion among people!
But one must, one must worm one's way ahead into society
Concealing, for one's career, the clanking of the bones...
The living sleep. The dead man rises from the grave, And goes to his bank, and goes to court, then to the Senate The whiter the night is, the blacker the malice of the day And the triumphant pens keep squeaking [Reeve 1962, 168].
We also cannot miss the article written by Prof. Galin Tihanov about one of Blok's poems in particular: "Прошли года, но ты - все та же " (1906), translated by Nikolai Bakhtin (1894-1950), the brother of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Nikolai Bakhtin was a professional translator and, as Tihanov pointed out in his work, while in Cambridge, "Bakhtin produced a body of texts centered on the question of the translatability of poetry" [Tihanov 2002, 269].
Serendipitously, all of Bakhtin's translations that he made in 1934 in
Новый филологический вестник. 2019. №3(50). --
Cambridge survived and remain in the Special Collections of the University of Birmingham Library. Bakhtin made two versions of Blok's poem (Tihanov names them as A and B). The first stanza looks the same in both fragments:
Thou hast not changed, thou art still the same As in the past; so placid, so serene. Only thy hair is straighter and in it Some silver threads are shining. And myself: A tall old man bent brooding o'er the books [Tihanov 2002, 271].
As we see, Bakhtin changes the rhyme structure of Blok's poem completely and uses enjambments, which are not presented in the original. Unlike Blok, Bakhtin tends to employ a more archaic style in both versions (thou hast etc.), and, although it is not specifically inappropriate, it looks rather excessive in this case. There is also an important issue here: as Tihanov says, "Moreover, Bakhtin also abandoned the epigraph to the original, Tiutchev's lines "Я знал ее еще тогда, / в те баснословные года.", which then led to the disregard for Blok's italics in his quotation of the phrase 'баснословные года' in the last line of the third quatrain ('Те баснословные года')" [Ibid.].
We can but agree with Tikhanov here and conclude that, despite its overall sophisticated quality, Bakhtin's attempt to translate Blok's poem does not seem to be that successful, though it is interesting as a poetic exercise with a sonnet form.
There is another web-article (or rather a blogpost) on the semi-academic platform "Culture Matters," dedicated to a comparison of a few translated versions of Blok's The Twelve, which has drawn our attention: despite being a brief summary of the excerpts of texts, it gives a fresh touch of a genuine literary observation of some translations of Blok. It is called "Black night, white snow: Alexander Blok's The Twelve," and written by John Ellison, who is a professional writer.
Giving a brief biography of Blok to the audience in the introduction, Ellison focuses on translations of The Twelve, naming several of them, from old to relatively new ones: "One English translation of The Twelve with its own definite character is that by prolific socialist author Jack Lindsay. Introduced by Lindsay, it was published in a slim 1982 Journeyman Press edition. <...> Another popular translation, by English poet Jon Stallworthy and collaborator Peter France, can be found in 20th Century Russian Poetry, edited by a later generation Soviet poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and published in 1993. These translators had previously, in 1970, published their version in The Twelve and other Poems. A third important translation is by Alex Miller. I located this in Soviet Russian Literature 1917-1977, compiled by Yuri Andreyev (1980), but Miller's translation can also be found in a separate Selected Poems by Blok. One more distinguished English version (more recent - 2010) is that by American academic Maria Carlson" [Ellison 2017].
Ellison carefully distinguishes all translations, referring to Miller's one as the most imaginative (Miller, for instance, uses slang for the most expressive parts), whereas "Stallworthy and France stands equally free, independent and impressive" [Ibid.]. At the same time, as Ellison points out, "Carlson's version may be, overall, more literal than the others." [Ibid.]. The most significant part of Ellison's essay is a juxtaposition of fragments that feature Katya's death. Let us have a look at them all:
Miller: Well, Katie, happy? Not a word.
Then lie there on the snow, you turd! ...
Stallworthy: Katie, are you satisfied? Lost your tongue?
Lie in the snowdrift then, like dung!
Lindsay: Happy now, Katya? I'd like to know.
Sprawl there, carrion, in the snow.
Carlson: Glad now, Kat'ka? 'What not a peep.
Then lie there, carrion, on the snow! ...
[Ibid.]
As we can see, all of them are completely different and vividly depict the task that translators face when they try to convey the most dramatic scene in the poem. The problem becomes more complex if we take into account how exactly translators cope with profanity: "падаль " in the original text. Yet again, we agree with Ellison who suggests that these particular examples sound too strong compared with the Russian text. He also reveals the grammatical difficulties, which every translator of the Russian author stumbles across, i.e. grammatical discrepancies, such as lack of contrasting articles a/the and more: "Because it has no 'a' or 'the', it relies, in putting nouns into singular or plural form, on adjusting their end letters. In relation to the numbers of words used in translating The Twelve, Miller's is the shortest, though is more than half again as long as the Russian original. Lindsay's is a fraction longer than that, and Stallworthy's is longer still" [Ibid.].
Overall, Ellison's essay, despite its concision, makes notable observations of the history of a variety of Blok translations.
And finally, our last but certainly not least reference is to the translations that also were made quite recently, only a few years ago, and published in 2015 as a collection of translated works of the Russian fin de siècle poets, including Blok, "Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts." This anthology has aroused massive interest in the subject, i.e. the Silver Age and its main representative figures, from wide circles of readers. As the authors of the edition note, "This volume gives at least a taste of the work of twenty-eight poets, plus texts from critics, memoirists, and prose writers (many of these, in fact, the very same poets) who analyzed or exemplified the spirit of the age" [Forrester, Kelly 2015,
xii].
Amongst the translators working with Blok's poems are Martha Kelly, Ellen Chances, Andrey Kneller, and Angela Livingstone: the actual amount of work they have done is not that substantial, which is ever so slightly disappointing (although we are aware that the format of the selected works has its own rules), but the reader can quickly see that only the very best translations are selected. Let us view two of them and compare them with those previously mentioned.
The first one, a translation of "Девушка пела в церковном хоре..." is by Ellen Chances and depicts a new, very modern interpretation of the well-known poem. Chances decided not to use a traditional rhyme, as was done before: that is why her version, although divided into stanzas, looks more like a vocative folk song, with its relaxing vowels and its sense of reconciliation in the end:
A young girl sang in a cathedral choir About all those tired souls in an alien land, About all the ships that had left for the sea, About all those who'd forgotten their very own joy.
So sang her voice, floating up to the dome,
And a ray of sun shone on her white shoulder,
And out of the gloom, everyone gazed and everyone listened
As the white gown sang in the ray of sun
[Forrester, Kelly 2015, 47].
The harmonious echo of each stanza in this translation leaves the audience with the feeling that the sharp grief for those who would never again return could be smoothed and transformed into a quiet and thoughtful sorrow.
As for Kneller's translation of The Twelve (the edition contains an excerpt), it also has its peculiar twist: Kneller follows Blok in his way of transforming the poem into a series of modernist posters, in which ambiguity resonates with a destructive reality:
Black night.
White snow.
Windy outside!
A man can't withstand the blow.
Windy outside -
On God's earth, world-wide.
[Forrester, Kelly 2015, 54].
Kneller is very careful with the number of words he uses here: despite its utmost concision, the portrayed landscape is absolutely Blok-like: tremendously wide, helplessly and desperately empty and fatal. Repeated words with consonant "w" (white, windy/windy) increase this dramatic effect. In our view, the introduction to the poem is one of the best.
* * *
To the conclusions:
Of course, our brief observation of several attempts at translating Blok's poetry can not be regarded as in any way complete: but we hope that it is only the first step, with many more to come.
REFERENCES (RUSSIAN)
1. Пайман А. Блок в английском и американском литературоведении // Литературное наследство. Т. 92: в 5 кн. Кн. 5. М., 1993. С. 362-402.
2. A Book of Russian Verse / by C.M. Bowra. London, 1943.
3. Blok A. The Twelve / translated from the Russian by Babette Deutsch and Abraham Yarmolinsky; introduction by the translators. New York, 1920.
4. Ellison J. Black night, white snow: Alexander Blok's The Twelve // Culture Matters. Sunday, 26 March 2017. URL: https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/ arts/poetry/item/2489-black-night-white-snow-alexander-blok-s-the-twelve (assessed 1.11.2018).
4. Grigson G. A Poetic Grand Master? // Country Life. 1979. March 8. P. 677.
5. Modern Russian poetry: texts and translations / selected and translated with an introduction by P. Selver. London; New York, 1917.
6. Poems from the Russian / chosen and translated by Frances Cornford and Esther Polianowsky Salaman. London, 1943.
7. Pyman A. The Life of Aleksandr Blok: The Distant Thunder, 1880-1908. Vol. 1. Oxford; New York, 1979.
8. Pyman A. The Life of Aleksandr Blok: The Release of Harmony, 1908-1921. Vol. 2. Oxford, 1980.
9. Reeve F.D. Aleksandr Blok Between Image and Idea. Number I Columbia Studies in the Humanities / edited under the auspices of the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University. New York; London, 1962.
10. Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts / edited and introduced by Sibelan E.S. Forrester and Martha M.F. Kelly. Boston, 2015.
11. Tihanov G. Nikolai Bakhtin as a translator of Alexander Blok // New Comparison: a Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies. 2002. № 33/4. Spring-Autumn. P. 267-272.
REFERENCES (Articles from Academic Journals)
1. Tihanov, G. Nikolai Bakhtin as a translator of Alexander Blok // New Comparison: a Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies. No. 33/4. Spring-Autumn 2002. P. 267—272. (In English).
(Articles from Proceedings and Collections of Research Papers)
2. Pyman A. Blok v angliyskom i amerikanskom literaturovedenii [Blok in English and American Literary Studies]. Literaturnoye nasledstvo [Literary Heritage]. Vol. 92:
in 5 books. Book 5. Moscow, 1993, pp. 362-402. (In Russian).
(Monographs)
3. Pyman A. The Life of Aleksandr Blok: The Distant Thunder, 1880-1908. Vol. 1. Oxford; New York, 1979. (In English).
4. Pyman A. The Life of Aleksandr Blok: The Release of Harmony, 1908-1921. Vol. 2. Oxford, 1980. (In English).
5. Reeve F.D. Aleksandr Blok Between Image and Idea. Number I Columbia Studies in the Humanities. Edited under the auspices of the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University. New York; London, 1962. (In English).
(Electronic Resources)
6. Ellison J. Black night, white snow: Alexander Blok's The Twelve. Culture Matters, Sunday, 26 March 2017. URL: https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/ arts/poetiy/item/2489-black-night-white-snow-alexander-blok-s-the-twelve (assessed 1.11.2018) (In English)
Elena E. Tchougounova-Paulson, Independent Scholar (Cambridge, England).
Candidate of Philology. She has worked as a Head of Communications Department and later as a Research fellow and publisher at the Research Information Centre at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow. As a textual scholar and translator, she took part in several editorial projects. Among them: Ukrainian nationalist organizations in the Second World War. Documents: in 2 volumes (ROSSPEN, Moscow, 2012); Alexander Dovzhenko: Diaries (Kharkov, Folio, 2013); Alexander Blok -L.D. Mendeleeva-Blok: Correspondence (1901-1917) (Moscow, IWL RAS, 2017). Academic interests: Russian Literature of the early 20th Century, English Literature, American Literature, Ukrainian Studies, Textual Studies, Theory of Literature, History of Literature, Horror Studies.
E-mail: tch.elena15@gmail.com
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9467-2876
Чугунова-Полсон Елена Евгеньевна, независимый исследователь (Кембридж, Великобритания).
Кандидат филологических наук. Работала ведущим научным сотрудником в отделе внешних коммуникаций Российского государственного архива литературы и искусства (РГАЛИ, Москва). В качестве текстолога и переводчика приняла участие в следующих издательских проектах: Украинские националистические организации в годы Второй Мировой войны (М.: РОССПЭН, 2012); Александр Довженко: Дневниковые записи (Харьков: Фолио, 2013); А.А. Блок -Л.Д. Менделеева-Блок: Переписка (1901-1917) (М.: ИМЛИ РАН, 2017). Область научных интересов: русистика, история русской литературы начала ХХ в., история английской литературы, история американской литературы начала ХХ в., украинистика, теория литературы, текстология, история литературы ужасов.
E-mail: tch.elena15@gmail.com
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9467-2876
