The Translation of Russian Literature into Hindi

This chapter examines the history of Russian literary translations into Hindi, starting with the founder of modern Hindi literature, Munshi Premchand (1880-1936), who translated Lev Tolstoy. Many Hindi writers were influenced by Russian literature, translations of which appeared in India from the Soviet publishing houses ‘Foreign Literature’, ‘Progress’, and ‘Raduga’. Some Russian classics were not only widely translated, but even re-translated. Prominent Hindi translators include the writer Bhishma Sahni (1915-2003), who translated Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and later Madan Lal Madhu (1925-2014), who spent most of his life in the USSR, during which he translated into Hindi more than a hundred works of Russian prose and poetry, many directly from Russian. This chapter will revisit their achievements and legacy.