Alisa v Strane Chudes, v strane chudes Alisy. Iz istorii knigi (review)

Few books for children have seen as many illustrations and translations as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, reason enough for Dmitry Ablin and Yuliya Bernshteyn-Venedskaya to publish a bibliophile edition of “Alice” in Russian in 2010. Alongside the story of Carroll’s heroine, following the still authoritative translation by Nina Demurova, the volume offers two survey articles on the history of its illustration and translation as well as more than four hundred annotated illustrations. These images are taken from mostly English-language editions from Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, but also from Spain (Salvador Dalí), Austria (Lisbeth Zwerger), and Russia, of course. This treasure trove of drawings, sketches, and water colours spans a large time frame, ranging from Carroll’s own illustrations to his manuscript of “Alice’s Adventures under Ground” (1864) and John Tenniel’s seminal images (1865) which, according to Olga Sinitsyna, have branded the character stereotypes of “Alice” illustrations to this date, to Peter Newell (1901/02), Arthur Rackham (1907), Ralph Steadman (1967 Ralph Steadman (1972), all the way to Barry Moser (1982), John Bradley (1992) and editions of the early years of the new millennium.

The illustrations punctuate the text, following neither a historical or generic order nor a classification by artistic technique, but highlighting specific scenes of the plot. This enables readers to make revealing comparisons and to discover the numerous pictorial solutions and ideas to individual scenes and characters from the novel. It also makes apparent which scenes or quotes from the text attracted most illustrations. While the opening scene, in which Alice encounters the White Rabbit, seems to have gained canonic status, some illustrators (such as the New Zealand artist Harry Rountree) also offer glimpses into more unusual events or moments of the plot. With a total of fifteen illustrations spread out over four double pages, the opening scene already displays the spectrum of possible pictorial interpretations. Almost every illustration is accompanied by a brief annotation, which acquaints readers with the technique, style, and possible intention of the artist.

This rich pictorial compilation is put into historical and artistic perspective in the opening survey article of Sinitsyna. In it, she sketches the history of “Alice” illustrations and presents landmark editions of the text. She focuses on selected points, such as the pictorial interpretation of Carroll’s protagonist or key events like the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Apart from elucidating well-known British, United States, Australian, or Canadian “Alice” editions, Sinicyna addresses methodological and stylistic issues, including the overriding question of what makes “Alice” so attractive for illustrators. She clearly demonstrates that the wide reception of the book did not only invite ever new artistic variations but also called for pictorial translations into different cultural contexts with diverging aesthetic traditions and ideological agendas. This is especially apparent in the case of the many Russian illustrations, which, due to the official ideology of cultural hegemony, produced curiosities such as Alice as a pioneer girl (Valery Alfeevsky, 1958). Within the Russian context, Sinicyna identifies the “Alice” illustrations by Gennady Kalinovsky (1974, 1988 among others), May Miturich (1977), whose abstract and minimalist way of rendering characters is particularly striking, as well as those by Yuri Vashchenko (1982), who marries naïve art with sophisticated style as being particularly worthy of attention.

The “Alice” volume also includes a compendium of the text’s translations into Russian. Apart from presenting famous translators, such as Vladimir Nabokov, who transposed Carroll’s text back during his years in Berlin (1923), Nina Demurova, an “Alice” translator herself, explains the specific circumstances the Victorian children’s book faced during Soviet times. As a fairy-tale narrative, “Alice” had very low currency during the 1920s because official doctrine considered fairy tales to be deviant literature and so condemned them as inadequate literature for Soviet children. This made new translations of...