The preceding chapters have discussed the methods by which censorial agents mediated foreign influences in their work, avoiding political and moral taboos and reinforcing the special status of the authorised Soviet language, and at certain points pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in translation by negotiating between the state and the reading public to satisfy both to the maximum extent. This chapter will examine more marked manifestations of contestation. The particular status of translation – and translators – in Soviet culture allowed those engaged in the transmission of foreign texts to engage in acts of resistance intended to disrupt the state control of literature and defy censorial controls. Translators came, in Brian James Baer's words, ‘to embody resistance, especially during the worst periods of repression’; as a result, they formed part of an ‘alternative pantheon of heroes’. Tactics employed to resist the censorship of translation included the employment of an Aesopian approach to translation and, a more obvious form of opposition, the production of samizdat translations, which began to appear in the 1950s. The employment of resisting tactics – especially as they frequently existed alongside accommodating or acquiescing approaches – complicates the widely held view of censorship as a monolithic force and further illustrates the complex relation of cultural producers to censorship experiences.

AESOPIAN TRANSLATION

An important tactic employed in the face of censorship was the ‘smuggling’ through of alternative, resistant meanings embedded in the text. This ‘Aesopian’ method of writing attempted to divert the attention of the censor and so allow resistant meanings to pass through to the reader. Lev Loseff, the Russian poet and scholar, described the means by which Aesopian language functioned in the Soviet context in his On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, in which he emphasised the importance of the participation of the ‘shrewd Aesopian reader’ in decoding the censored text. The complicity between the reader and the author, who enter into a time-and space-separated relationship, is key in transmitting material that could avoid detection by a political authority. The Aesopian approach was a strategy to mitigate repressive censorship through a strategic employment of euphemism. To do so, the author of the text employed a set of ‘screens’ and ‘markers’; the first was ‘bent on concealing the Aesopian text’ while the latter drew attention to it, drawing the intended reader into the process of meaning (re) creation.