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The novel The Gadfly (1897) enjoyed enormous popularity in the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries in the twentieth century. The novel was first canonized in the Soviet Union, listed as an extracurricular reading for middle school students, and then canonized in China in the 1950s and early 1960s. Instead of inviting open-ended interpretations, the authorities endorse a politicized interpretation of the novel, portraying the Catholic hero "Gadfly" as a romantic revolutionary fighting for national independence. In contrast to its immediate success in socialist countries, the novel is hardly known and even largely forgotten in the West. This essay looks into the translation, circulation, and reception of the novel in the Soviet Union and China, particularly the political power structures inherent in the processes of its canonization in these socialist countries. Despite the political effort to elevate it to the status of a literary canon in the socialist bloc, the novel never entered a canon of world literature as such, which, I argue, should be tested out by its intrinsic literary values and appreciated by worldwide communities of enlightened readers, free from heavy-handed political interventions and ideological manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article the author addresses the problem of censorship of literature in Poland during the communist years. The introduction describes the basic assumptions of communist censorship and emphasizes Poland’s close dependence on the USSR. The state of research on communist censorship in the former Eastern Bloc is briefly outlined in order to provide background for the discussion of the communist censorship in Poland. The methods of Polish censors are also described: preventive censorship, making two reviews, eliminating a part of the text or banning the printing of the whole text. The main part of the article details the methods of censorship in Poland by period (a chronological aspect), characterizes the banned topics (political, moral and ideological censorship) and gives examples of authors who had trouble with publishing. It also discusses the differences between censorship of Polish contemporary literature, classics and translations from foreign languages. It is argued that the existence of state control determined the peculiarity of Polish literature during the communist period. Censorship influenced the formation of the canon and restricted the development of some topics and aspects of poetics. Furthermore, state control destroyed the careers of writers and a broader potential of literature. Finally, the translations of important texts of world literature were not allowed to be printed or were very late, which resulted in the isolation of Polish literature (and readers). In the last part of the article the author presents new perspectives for further research: a transnational, postcolonial and “minority narrative” perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the selection and publication of foreign literature in the USSR was subject to state control, many foreign works were able to reach the Soviet reader, thanks to the clever strategies employed by editors, literary advisers, critics, and translators. This was particularly true in the case of foreign literature written by Western authors, which underwent more rigorous control and often required incisive cultural and ideological domestication in order to comply with the aesthetics of the Soviet literary canon. Through the analysis of a corpus of published and unpublished Soviet critical texts, this article sheds new light on the Soviet system of cultural production by taking into account the strategies implemented, at different levels, by cultural operators, and in particular by critics. This article focuses on the Soviet reception of Western anti-mimetic novels by Italo Calvino and Kurt Vonnegut, illustrating the strategies of critical domestication to which they were subjected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1930s the 'canonization' of selected foreign writers formed an important part of official policies towards translated literature. The term 'canonization' refers here to the process of transorming a writer into an exemplar for others to emulate. The article analyses ways in which several Western authors (Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, and André Gide) were canonized in the Soviet Union and what the role of the Party state and official criticism (ofitsial'naia kritika) was in this process. The article pays particular attention to the benefits and drawbacks of the 'canonization' from the point of view of the Party state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how Vadim Andreev (1902-1976) promoted the posthumous literature of his father, Russian author Leonid Andreev (1871-1919), through his autobiographical writings and other marketing methods. He published “A Tale about Father” while part of the Russian émigré community in Paris, France in 1938, and later published "Childhood in the Soviet Union" in 1963 and 1968 while in the Soviet Union. Other topics considered include cultural relationships, marketing strategies, symbolic capital, and the politics of literature and Russian literary canon in the Soviet Union.

The article features the scheme of library classification applied to standard catalogs and printed cards for public libraries in Moscow, U.S.S.R. Two important facts about the classification scheme are excluded from the title page such as the version of the Dewey Decimal Classification and that the scheme is in a direct line of succession to the L. N. Tropovskii abridgment of Dewey. In spite that it is widely used for the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin literature to the Soviet Union, it is still a fact that the scheme is based on Dewey which was also admitted by Tropovskii in his introduction. The two important changes in Tropovskii's short schedule are the use of special devices for giving primacy to the classics of communism and books on the USSR and people's republics.