I Became His Wife: Translating Jane Eyre In The Soviet Era

"I Became His Wife": Translating Jane Eyre in the Soviet Era In the midst of the Stalinist era, the most enduring Russian translation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was published. In 1950, poet Vera Stanevich translated the novel, which brought greater interest in Charlotte Brontë's work. (Yamalova 40). A 1988 edition of Stanevich's translation shows how the predominant communist ideologies of the Soviet government influenced literary publishing–particularly with a foreign work. The introduction references Karl Marx's adoration of Jane Eyre, how the protagonist is an ideal communist heroine, and how the novel itself defies capitalist social structures. A biography of Charlotte Brontë in the introduction also emphasizes both the romance plot between Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester and claims that this love story most definitely comes from

The publisher's introduction and biography frame Jane Eyre with communist ideologies, reduces the complexity of the novel to its romance plot, and places greater weight on Brontë's biography over her artistry–which demonstrates how publishers, especially those in a particular historical and societal context, influence the reading of novels. Stanevich's translation retains much of Charlotte Brontë's voice, but the subtleties of the author's meaningful syntax are lost through the translation. Additionally, the final lines of the novel are omitted in the translation–raising the question of who truly has control over how a literary work is published, the translator or the publisher? Hence, the 1988 edition of Vera Stanevich's translation of Jane Eyre illustrates how a particular