Granstrem’s translation of Alice is representative of a well-established tradition in children’s literature—that of moral edification through informative and factual knowledge.
Considering this tradition, both within its own context and vis-à-vis Nabokov, helps further illuminate a very different strategy in Nabokov’s Ania. The genre of children’s literature in the nineteenth century can be characterized by what Ronald Reichertz called
“a battle between several major kinds of literature: religious, rational/moral, and informational on one side and imaginative on the other.”49 Showing how Carroll’s Alice emerged in the context of this struggle, Reichertz points out that Alice, as she tries to make sense of the trials of Wonderland, unmistakably resorts to knowledge drawn from educational and moralistic children’s literature. Thus, struggling with the haunting question “Who are you?,” Alice tries to “reassert her sense of self” by reciting Watts’s “Against Idleness and Mischief” and repeating her lesson in geography and the multiplication tables.50
The publishing of children’s books in Russia, which began with the activity of Nikolai Novikov in the mid-eighteenth century, evolved into a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon in the nineteenth century. Iurii Lotman observed that the children’s world in the nineteenth century was an inalienable part of the women’s world, and as women’s readership grew, so did children’s: children read what women read.51 The influence of women’s readings (mostly novels), as well as the new, idealized status of women established by the Romantics, accounts for the spirit of the Decembrists’
generation—people whose very upbringing prepared them for the life of idealistic heroics and stoicism. Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe were translated from their French versions. Children’s Plutarch (Instruction on Child Rearing)52 made the ideal of a Roman republic irresistible for adolescents. For example, the young Muraviev brothers, Aleksandr and Nikita, future Decembrists, dreamed of the island of Sakhalin, where, as new Robinsons, they would start the whole history of mankind anew, without slavery, money, or
social oppression—an ideal republic of Choka.53 On the other hand, the ambivalence of the controls exercised by women in society—
which posited them as the embodiment of the social ideal, but one that was promulgated only through private moral influence—
accounted for carrying over the ideals of piety, domesticity, and submissiveness to child rearing. The channel for diffusion of this domestic ideology was, as Diana Greene argues, “the translation into Russian of English, French, and German conduct books.”54 Such translations as Josephine Lebassu’s Blagovospitannoe ditia, ili kak dolzhno sebia vesti (s frantsuzskogo) (A Well-Bred Child, or How a Child Ought to Behave [Translated from French]), 1847; “Sovety malenkim detiam” (“Advice to Little Children”), an 1844 translation from the French children’s magazine Le Bon Genie; and Maria Edgeworth’s Prakticheskoe vospitanie (Practical Eduction) were published and reviewed in leading Russian journals.55
Rational/moral didacticism was the prevalent discourse of the prominent Zadushevnoe slovo, a children’s magazine founded by Sofia Makarova in 1877 (two illustrated versions for children ages 5-9 and 9-14). It reiterated themes and a genre of stories from the French “Bibliothèque Rose,” described by Nabokov in relation to his own childhood as “an awful combination of preciosity and vulgarity.”56 “All those Les Malheurs de Sophie, Les Petites Filles Modèles, Les Vacances,”57 written by Comptesse de Ségur, née Sophie Rostopchine, a “Frenchified,” idealized version of sentimental childhood, and the subsequent original Russian stories by Lidia Charskaia, very popular at the turn of the century, also terrify Martin, the protagonist of Nabokov’s Russian novel Podvig (Glory, 1932), and lead him to a profoundly misogynistic conclusion about books written by women.58
The enduring popularity of this kind of children’s literature is attested to by the entries in the children’s section of the systematic catalogue of 1853-1905 of the M. O. Volf St. Petersburg and Moscow Publishing Association (“tovarishchestvo M. O. Volf”) and that of the “newest books of belles lettres and all branches of knowledge” of 1913.59Along with the “new foreign literature”—Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett (Mikhail Nikolskii’s 1901 translation of The Little Lord Fauntleroy), and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (in Matvei
Peskovskii’s adaptation)—the 1905 catalogue lists the 1903 Russian version of Mme de Ségur’s Filles Modèles (“Twenty eight stories in conversations for small children”) and L. Charskaia’s Princess Dzhavakha.60
Children’s literature also reinforced gender stereotypes:
“While all children were expected to be submissive to (that is, controlled by) adults, boys and girls were subject to different kinds of control. . . . Little boys only had to submit to physical control;
they were not to fidget. Little girls, who, it was assumed, would not fidget, were expected to be psychologically and emotionally submissive as well. . . .”61 Greene’s interesting comparative analysis of two Russian children’s journals of the mid-nineteenth century—
Zvezdochka (Little Star) 1842-1849 for girls and Biblioteka dlia vospitaniia (Library for Education) 1843-1846 for boys—shows that piety, purity, and domesticity appeared to be exclusively female concerns,62 while emphasis on factual information, including history and mythology, characterized the boys’ magazine. The informational strand in children’s literature was best represented by the prolifera-tion of children’s encyclopedias. The first Russian encyclopedias for children appeared in the 1760s and were translated from French or German. By 1800, at least eighteen titles were published.63 Many encyclopedias were based on the catechetic question-answer principle; some, like the multi-volume Spectacles of Nature and Arts (the translation of the Viennese Scaupaltz der Natur und der Künste), were beautifully illustrated and republished several times.
The first original Russian encyclopedic edition for children, first published at the end of the eighteenth century, saw eleven re-editions, the last of them appearing in 1837.64 The enduring presence of informational literature for children (like Peter Parley’s tales and magazine in England) is evident also in Russian children’s magazines, even at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, the issues of Tropinka in which Allegro’s Alice was serialized contain assorted short informational entries,
“Vesti otovsiudu” (“News from everywhere”), that range from the discovery of the North Pole by Robert Peary to descriptions of elements of natural history, such as the northern lights (aurora borealis).65
These moralistic and informational trends in children’s literature may account for the features of the 1908 translation of Alice by Granstrem, Prikliucheniia Ani v mire chudes. The word
“translation” in this case deserves quotation marks, for this version, in all innocence, does not claim to do more than fulfill—however unsuccessfully—its function as an adaptation for Russian children.
The edition itself indicates that it was “composed” or “compiled”
rather than “translated” by Granstrem. In and of itself, the result is quite a paradox: Carroll’s tale, which distorts and parodies the pervasiveness of informational and moralistic children’s literature, is boomeranged back into a version of that same dominant discourse. Perversely understanding the original along the lines of edifying didacticism, the translation purports to explain and round the edges of this strange and eccentric tale and to use it to teach a few lessons under a thin veil of a plot. It is a Russified version (Granstrem was the first to introduce “Ania” as the Russian
“Alice”), but its Russification is strictly utilitarian: it is Russian textbook material that relies on memorization for entertainment.
Thus, examining a magic bottle, the good girl Ania muses on all the bad things that can happen to children “when they don’t obey their mama and papa.”66 The plot develops as a series of vignettes, providing Ania with an opportunity to recite Ivan Krylov’s fables, which had been, to use Karlinsky’s words, “endlessly anthologized and traditionally memorized by the Russians practically since their infancy.”67She recites them all without a single mistake and concludes with satisfaction: “Yes, I haven’t forgotten this one!”68 The Mouse’s story turns into a recitation of hexameters—an excerpt from The War of Mice and Frogs, Vasilii Zhukovskii’s version of the Greek Batrachomiomachia.69 Immediately before meeting a pink caterpillar (the only explanation for this remarkable change in color might be that the story is written for young girls: pink was considered more of a “girls’ color” in Russia because of the pink ribbon of the order of St. Catherine, awarded at birth to all female newborns of the Imperial family since the late eighteenth century), Ania sings a song. The singing comes completely unprovoked and unmotivated:
the song is the same “God’s Little Bird” from Pushkin’s long poem The Gypsies—the pervasive text for all Russified versions of Alice,
including Nabokov’s. However, in Granstrem’s translation, it is not material for parody: it is sung correctly and completely and even the musical notation is provided.70 All scenes not directly serving the straightforward educational purpose as well as all puns are simply omitted. The last chapter is tellingly entitled “Ania Outsmarts Everybody.”
There are many absurdities in this translation: the Caterpillar accuses Ania of making a mistake as she recites yet another fable, while indeed there is none;71 the text of the letter read in the court scene as a piece of evidence is as cryptic as a piece of post-modern poetry: “hungry . . . one two three . . . they (women) are here . . . don’t swim . . . nobody knew”;72 the child-turned-pig “pants as a locomotive,”73 etc. While Carroll’s text is able to “take material that is diametrically in opposition to fantasy, generically alien material, and give it a home in his fantasies,”74 the Granstrem translation undertakes the opposite operation: it takes a fantasy and purports to accommodate it within an uncomfortably alien discourse. The resulting lack of sense is a compliment to the stubborn resistance of the original. The only things that Nabokov seems to share with this version are the Russified name of the heroine—Ania—and the fact of Russification itself. Instructing or morally edifying little girls was the last thing on his mind. In fact, Carroll and the young Nabokov stand in solidarity against the very raison d’etre of Granstrem’s Ania, which foreshadows the militant anti-utilitarianism of Nabokov’s future fiction.