O seeking Flaubert, you have foreseen us (The Russian translations of Salambbô as an indicator of the change of cultural epochs)

Abstract

Gustave Flaubert is one of those writers who had a significant impact on the formation and the development of the Russian literary process; being the brightest representative of French literature of the era of realism, Flaubert played a significant role in Russia’s transitional epoch. Working on the novel Salambbô (1862), Flaubert foresaw its ill fortunes in modern France and in the modern epoch as a whole. Since the 1890s, many representatives of Russian modernism saw a teacher and a predecessor in the French writer and translated his works (I. Bunin, D. Merezhkovsky, K. Balmont, M. Gorky, N. Minsky, Al. Chebotarevskaya, M. Voloshin, A. Blok, Vyach. Ivanov, B. Zaitsev, M. Kuzmin). A line from Balmont’s poem The World Communion (1905) — O seeking Flaubert, you have foreseen us — can serve as an illustration of Flaubert’s Russian fate. In general, the interest in Salambbô is explained by an acute interest in exotic epochs and countries, a desire to distance oneself from vulgar, bourgeois in modernity, a heroine whose image is built on the intersection of mystical and erotic elements in woman’s life, а striving for perfection in the mastery of word. Many Russian writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries passed through the school of Flaubert with his wonderful experience of recreating the atmosphere of Carthage and the Middle East, relying both on historical sources, as well as in the field of language and style, on Holy Scripture.