‘Russia has so far given humanity nothing but samovars’

This essay aims to describe the main trends in the Hungarian reception of translated Russian literature from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the twentieth, when I will discuss the problems relevant to the Socialist era. I will trace the translation journey through four periods, starting in the 1820s with indirect translations from German or French, and ending with direct versions from Russian. I list translations of both major and obscure nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, paying special attention to the early Socialist movement and later, after the Second World War, to state ideology, when the “Muscovites”, Hungarians returning from Soviet emigration, played a leading role. The historical cataclysms of both wars and of the 1956 Hungarian uprising were followed by renewed totalitarian sanctions until a cultural thaw under János Kádár (in power 1956-88). This essay concludes with three brief case studies on the translation of censored Russian authors and samizdat, from my own direct experience as a translator. The first case study concerns Evtushenko’s poem ‘Babii Iar’; the second studies how various novels by Nabokov were accepted or rejected for Hungarian translation, drawing upon internal reports (now kept in closed archives of the Literary Museum) commissioned by Hungary’s only foreign-language publisher, Európa. The last case study describes my involvement in the Hungarian translation of Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog in 1986.