Top
This book examines the 1920s and 1930s as a critical juncture in the rich history of the Russian reception of Laurence Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Drawing on archival sources, it traces how this eccentric eighteenth-century Yorkshire clergyman was read and admired within an increasingly totalitarian society. It is difficult to imagine a phenomenon more antithetical to the Bolshevik vision of society than the whimsical universe of Laurence Sterne. Yet it is precisely this apparent incongruity that makes Sterne--whom Nietzsche once called 'the freest writer of all times'--a revealing figure for understanding cultural life in the early Soviet period. By situating individual readerly encounters within broader biographical, cultural, and institutional contexts, this book treats Sternean reception as part of the wider history of the survival of intellectual autonomy after the revolution. At its centre is the question of how individuals found forms of escape in the subversive, digressive worlds of Sterne's fiction.
The book combines book history, group biography, translation studies, and reader response criticism to examine the publication, circulation, and reception of Sterne's works in Soviet Russia. It focuses on specific institutional and material contexts: publishing houses, editorial practices, censorship, and the everyday lives of readers and translators. It also sheds new light on Shklovskii's reception of Sterne and, looking beyond Russian Formalism, recovers a range of overlooked figures and introduces a wealth of previously unpublished material, including unknown translations of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, scholarly essays, illustrations, and private letters.
