Today’s guest blogger is Grace Skidmore, a graduate student at University of Virginia. In her first Global Chaucers post, Grace provides a sensitive reading of the autolithographs illustrating a late-Soviet edition of Russian Chaucer. As you’ll see, her scholarship draws on the work of another Global Chaucerian, Lian Zhang, whose study of Chinese Chaucers has revealed the deep influences of Soviet literary scholars. In her turn, Grace helps us understand how Chaucer could be translated in an authorized edition that also used its illustrations to forcefully critique the regime.
Don’t forget to clink on the links to Sergey Barkhin’s dramatic illustrations. We think you’ll see that they provide a illuminating contrast to illustrations we find elsewhere in the 1980s. Please share your thoughts with us. –CB
by Grace Skidmore
Illustrations of Global Chaucers have emerged as both independent and supplemental adaptations of his work for centuries across cultures. One version of the Soviet Chaucer that combines translation with illustration is the 1980 edition of Ivan Kashkin and Osip Rumer’s Russian translation of Kenterberijskie rasskazy.[1] As the authoritative Soviet translation from Middle English to modern Russian,[2] Rumer and Kashkin translated the majority of the original Canterbury Tales which were well-received by Russian readers.[3] The 1980 edition features notes by Shakespeare scholar Alexandr Anikst, as well as a series of autolithographs (etchings on charcoal plates) from the artist Sergey Barkhin. Of Chaucer’s original twenty-four tales, only seventeen appear in Kenterberijskie rasskazy, and each of these seventeen tales is illustrated by at least one of Barkhin’s autolithographs. The remaining seven tales were not translated for a Russian audience until 2007, when Tamara Popova’s edition completed the Tales. (See links below to seven of the images available on Barkhin’s website.)
For almost a century, the arm of the USSR’s censorship bureau known as Glavlit stymied Soviet audiences’ contact with foreign literature and restricted these to a few texts, aside from samizdat (or underground publications). In spite of this generalized wariness of outside influence on the communist experiment, Shakespeare and Chaucer studies still experienced a high level of scholarly interest and exposure in Soviet literary studies. Lian Zhang has noted in her work on Chaucer reception in China that the Soviet literary interest relies on the perception that these authors focalized stories through workers and peasants, rather than royalty, bringing forth qualities of a national literature.[4]
Much of the artistic work depicting The Canterbury Tales conforms to realism or romantic styles, throwing Barkhin’s turn to the abstract into sharp relief.[5] Honored as the People’s Artist of Russia in 1998 for outstanding achievements in multiple art forms, Barkhin’s connection to architecture and theater is evident in the drawings’ awareness of light and space, with the moment he highlights seeming at once everywhere and nowhere. He explains his purpose in illustrating is to allow the reader a fixed second in time, and “not insert into it complicated and confused ideas about the entire world.”[6] In spite of this commitment, complicated ideas of the world nevertheless creep into his artistic reimaginings of The Canterbury Tales. Barkhin remediates each tale by capturing the story in a single frame with a focus on place that strips away much of the lightheartedness in Chaucer’s stories by giving voice to the pilgrims’ anxieties projected into events of bloodshed, incest, betrayal, and murder. Each second of each story portrays a deep anxiety in the darkness in the pilgrims’ stories and emphasizes the elements of uncertainty lurking along Pilgrim’s Way, a vision capsulized in the Flemish friends’ death by debauchery in Barkhin’s illustration of The Pardoner’s Tale.
As products of their own political environment in Soviet culture, the illustrations seem to echo the Soviet ideological reshaping of human life with the illustrations’ shared sense of night and distortions of the land and people. With the USSR of 1980 fraught with economic and political reforms, a new edition of Chaucer was also being published, and Barkhin echoes the uncertainties of the future and a sense of haunted awareness of the past that recalls a disregard for human suffering. Barkhin’s adaptations of Chaucer’s stories translate these experiences into art by tapping into non-traditional modes of depicting medieval England.
In this way, Barkhin’s depictions add an edge to Kashkin and Rumer’s Chaucer translation by taking root in the USSR’s various movements of modernism after decades of censorship. In this way, the 1980 Kenterberijskie rasskazy constructs new artistic contexts for Russian audiences of Chaucer in Russia and beyond, resonating with the conflicted and even violent pasts of medieval England and of the Soviet people.
[i] Geoffrey Chaucer.[Джеффри Чосер] Kenterberijskie rasskazy. [Кентерберийские рассказы] Vstupitelʹnaia stat’ia, sostavlenie, primechaniia А. Abramovicha Aniksta; perevod s angliĭskovo I. Kashkina, O. Borisovich Rumera ; khudozhnik C. Barkhin. [вступительная статья, составление, примечания А. Аникста; перевод с английского И. Кашкина, О. Румера ; художник С. Бархин] 1980.
[ii] Inna Starostina. “Chaucer in Russia: Some Aspects of the History of Chaucer Studies in the Russian Tradition,” The New Chaucer Society, Aug 29, 2017, https://newchaucersociety.org/blog/entry/chaucer-in-russia.
[iii] Alec Brown, “Review: Chaucer in Russian by Ivan Kashkin,” The Slavic and East European Review 25, no. 65 (1947): 586.
[iv] Lian Zhang, “Chaucer in China: A History of Reception and Translation,” The Chaucer Review 55, no. 1 (2020): 10.
[v] Chaucer Editions website compiles illustrations through 1920. https://chaucereditions.wordpress.com.
[vi] All autolithographs from website “Sergei Barkhin– Illiustratsii.” [Сергей Бархин – Иллюстрации] Barkhin.ru.
Illustrations:
The Pardoner’s Tale: https://barkhin.ru/knigi/illyustratsii/#&gid=psgal_140_1&pid=9
The Wife of Bath’s Tale: https://barkhin.ru/knigi/illyustratsii/#&gid=psgal_140_1&pid=8
The Physician’s Tale I: https://barkhin.ru/knigi/illyustratsii/#&gid=psgal_140_1&pid=11
The Physician’s Tale II: https://barkhin.ru/knigi/illyustratsii/#&gid=psgal_140_1&pid=12
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale I: https://barkhin.ru/knigi/illyustratsii/#&gid=psgal_140_1&pid=13
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale II: https://barkhin.ru/knigi/illyustratsii/#&gid=psgal_140_1&pid=14
The Reeve’s Tale: https://barkhin.ru/knigi/illyustratsii/#&gid=psgal_140_1&pid=15
