This book focuses on the considerable but neglected body of works translated by S. S. Koteliansky from 1919–1923 in collaboration with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Close-readings and broad cross-cultural contextualisations point to the influence that translating Russian authors such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky had on the writers individually, as well as to the relevance of these collaborations within the poetics and cultural dynamics of Anglophone modernism. Koteliansky’s collaborative translations with other writers, including Leonard Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, is also ... More

This book focuses on the considerable but neglected body of works translated by S. S. Koteliansky from 1919–1923 in collaboration with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Close-readings and broad cross-cultural contextualisations point to the influence that translating Russian authors such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky had on the writers individually, as well as to the relevance of these collaborations within the poetics and cultural dynamics of Anglophone modernism. Koteliansky’s collaborative translations with other writers, including Leonard Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, is also evoked. Read as an oeuvre, the co-translations suggest how the practical workings of an exceptional collaborative partnership impacted on Woolf and Mansfield’s creative vision and literary apprenticeship as they experimented with voice, consciousness, gendered language and masks. By also highlighting literary networks, editorial agendas, publishers’ policies and marketing strategies in the post-revolutionary and post-war years, the study contributes to our understanding of the cultural and historical dynamics of literary translation.