Literary commentary and literary translation as forms of indirect statement (on the marginalia by Andrei Egunov)

Abstract

As a scholar and translator, Andrei Egunov (1895–1968) was focused on antiquity and its reception in Russian culture. However, there are two documents in his archive that attest to his interest in German literature: a translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Griechenland (Greece) and the article Literary Reminiscences in “The Torrents of Spring” that summarizes the results of his studies of Ivan Turgenev. The present article investigates the biographical and literary background of Egunov’s German studies and seeks to reveal the context of these works and their involvement with the issue of personal and cultural memory beyond the scope of his usual translation and literary studies. Egunov’s translation of Hölderlin’s poem, his only poetic translation, may have stemmed not merely from his general interest in German literature or his experience living in Germany were as a Gastarbeiter during WWII. First and foremost, it was an address to his colleagues and friends in the ABDEM circle, an expression of nostalgia not so much for Ancient Greece as for the times when the members of ABDEM were translating and studying the classical legacy together in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In his article about the German reminiscences in Turgenev, Egunov touches upon specific features of his own poetics — perhaps, in a way as a reminiscence, too. We know of three literary works written by Egunov under the pseudonym “A. Nikolev”: the novel Po tu storonu Tuly [Beyond Tula], the collection of poems Eliseiskie radosti [Elysian Pleasures] and the poem Bespredmetnaia iunost’ [Subjectless Youth], all distinguished by their deep intertextuality. Egunov’s observations of similar phenomena in Turgenev and his distinction between literary allusions and “inadvertent” reminiscences lead us to a deeper understanding of the nature of A. Nikolev’s poetic world through the prism of A. Egunov’s literary studies.