Overcoming Prejudice: The Image of Mr. Darcy in Russian Translations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Based on the Translations by I. Marshak and A. Livergant)

The relevance of studying the translations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) into the Russian language is due not only to the novels continued popularity worldwide, including in Russia, but also to a cultural dimension of interest: its transfer into different cultural landscapes. One of the important layers of studying this problem from our point of view is an appeal to methods of analyzing the image of Mr. Darcy, which focus discussions on the horizon of interpretations of culturally given meanings both in English literature itself and in its reception abroad. This article explores how the cultural semantics of Mr. Darcy’s character are conveyed into Russian through two key translations of the book — the first by I. Marshak (1967) and the most recent by A. Livergant (2023) — which together with the original novel Pride and Prejudice serve as the material for the study. The purpose of the study is to establish the possibilities and limits of translating the cultural names (culturonyms) used in Jane Austen's original text to describe the character of Mr. Darcy into Russian. To achieve that goal the study aims to: (1) identify the main features of Austen’s literary reception in Anglophone culture; (2) clarify the scope and transformation of the so-called “Austen cult”; (3) analyze the reception of Austen’s work in Russia, with attention to the perception of her novels, namely the translations of Pride and Prejudice, as “women’s fiction”; (4) compare selected lexical and stylistic strategies used to convey Mr. Darcy’s image in the original text and in Marshak’s and Livergant’s translations. Based on the theories of pragmatic and stylistic equivalence, interpretative and imagological approaches are used in line with the results of the analysis of culturonyms. Biographical, comparative-historical, textual-critical, and autoethnographic methods are also employed. As a result of the study, it was established that Marshak’s translation of the novel to a greater extent takes into account the ambivalence of meanings inherent in such cultural names as “noble”, “rudeness”, “pride”, “confidence”, etc. The translation made by A. Livergant demonstrates a narrowing of the semantic horizon of these concepts to meet the task of adapting the text to the modern cultural situation, significantly simplifying the original culturally significant contexts. In Conclusion, firstly, the key features of the perception of J. Austen's novels in the English-speaking cultural space relate to the line of divergence between scientific approaches to studying the significance of this author in English literature and, on the other hand, the popularization of the images she created, primarily through the film adaptations of her novels. Secondly, the phenomenon of “Janeism” (“Austen cult”), which has been traced in literature for more than a century, has today gone far beyond the framework of “strict” literary imitation, spreading Austen’s psychologism, attention to culturally significant details, and sharp social and everyday satire to other themes, plots, types and genres of art. Thirdly, in Russia, the writer's work received wide recognition mainly through the film adaptations of the novel Pride and Prejudice, which led to its deliberately simplified assessment as “women's prose”; at the same time, the depth of perception of Austen's prose was ensured primarily by literary translations of the novel. Finally, the identified culturonyms characterizing the image of Mr. Darcy in the original text allow us to consider I. S. Marshak's translation as more in line with the task of a “rich description” of English culture by means of the Russian language, while A. Livergant's translation represents a variant of cultural adaptation that emphasizes the demands of modern mass culture for emotionally charged evaluation and structural simplicity of possible interpretations of the initially multi-layered cultural meanings.  Both types of translations, however, construct ideas about the “old” English culture, overcoming some stereotypes and creating new ones, which, in light of the theory of translation equivalence (more precisely, the unattainability of complete equivalence in any translation), opens up the possibility of both scientific and readerly interactive interaction with the text, echoing Austen’s own strategy of challenging entrenched social and cultural biases and overcoming prejudices.

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