A STUDY OF THE TRANSLATION AND RECEPTION OF THE NOVEL “DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER” IN RUSSIA

Abstract

The article examines the formation and evolution of the Russian-language perception of Cao Xueqin’s novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” as the result of a multilevel cultural transfer in which translation functions not only as a linguistic operation but also as a hermeneutic reconfiguration of a worldview. It is shown that the key difficulties arise in the transmission of philosophically charged categories that organize the ontological framework of the work: the dialectic of truth and illusion, the positive semantics of “emptiness,” as well as the category of “feeling” as a universal connective force not reducible to individual psychology. The analysis demonstrates that the Russian tradition of interpretation tends toward the substantialization and moral polarization of meanings, as a result of which the metaphysical fluidity of the original is transformed into familiar oppositions of “truth/falsehood” and “being/non-being,” while the hero’s withdrawal from the world of forms is read in a tragic register. A significant place is given to a comparison of the Confucian model of clan and personality with Russian conceptions of family and the autonomy of the subject, revealing mechanisms of “false recognition,” when the social fabric of the Jia lineage is automatically correlated with the noble-intelligentsia experience. The influence of the late Soviet ideological horizon on the emphases of reception is traced separately, as it reinforced sociologized readings at the expense of the mystical-ethical connections of karma, duty, and predestination. As a result, the novel appears in the Russian language as an autonomous semantic field in which the inevitable losses of the original are compensated by productive accretions of interpretation that are significant for comparative studies, the sociology of literature, and philosophical anthropology.