PU SONGLING’S LITERARY HERITAGE AND ITS TRANSLATIONS INTO RUSSIAN

Abstract

While speaking of Pu Songling’s (1640–1715) impact on the Chinese literature one can’t help mentioning his short stories about fox turnskins and other wonders, known in English as Strange Tales from the Chinese Studio (Liao Zhai zhi yi). Commonly here the general survey concludes, and the main efforts are directed to analysis of the author’s pencraft and concealed political implications, since most of the plots are believed to be not original but adopted from earlier oeuvre. Thus the two major implied notions can be worded in the following fashion: 1) Strange Tales are the only work by Pu Songling to be mentioned and 2) they happen to be quite a secondary piece of literature based on borrowed stories and twisted about to serve the new main objective — mockery on social and political routine of the author’s present. The chief idea of the article is to cast a doubt on both of these notions and to show diversity and richness of Pu Songling’s genres and subjects as well as finding out the basis of these texts’ attractiveness for readers for more than 300 years. The other goal of the paper is to give a short overview of Pu Songling’s translations into Russian and their influence on the literary tradition of modern Russian prose. The main focus is put on the difficulties any translator is to face, on the quest for the optimal form of reproduction of the original’s peculiarities. Since the language of Pu Songling’s stories is Classical Chinese (wenyan), the author’s mastership in reproduction of different speech styles including common vernacular is also to be mentioned and analyzed.