When Philology Becomes Ideology: The Russian Perspective of J.R.R. Tolkien

Although I am old and gray of head,And free of the stresses that others all dread,I would learn English¹ and only becauseThe Professor in it wove a marvelous clause.

——Russian Tolkienist Limerick

Interest in the literary creations of J.R.R. Tolkien took flight almost immediately after the publication of Lord of the Rings (1955). The political system in Russia during the Soviet period, however, was not quite receptive to a book like this. The Iron Curtain kept the Russian reader well protected from everything that was happening in western society. The concepts of twentieth-century English literature were distorted and details extremely scanty. The English authors who were translated were carefully selected, and the official publication of translations of the works of such authors as G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams was practically impossible. That the publication of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows was hindered because the censor thought that the chapter "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" was dangerous is an excellent example of the situation that Tolkien's books were destined to encounter in the Soviet Union.

In the 1950s, a group of translators who were devotees of western literature formed around Zinaida Bobyr, a well-known translator of science fiction. The popularity of this genre in the USSR grew in the late-1950s following the launch of the first artificial earth satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957. Bobyr's list of translation credits includes Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, John Gordon, Edmond Hamilton, Clifford Simak, and Stanislaw Lem, whom she translated from Polish. She was the one who first decided to acquaint the Soviet reader with The Lord of the Rings. In order to get around the barriers of censorship, however, she had to find a way to make it resemble the literature that was acceptable in the USSR, which meant that she had to reduce Tolkien's text either to a fairy tale or to science fiction.

Bobyr's "translation" combined The Hobbit and the trilogy under the common name of The Lay of the Ring. The book was subjected to a considerable abridgement, and at the beginning of each chapter there was a short "interlude." The translator's plan was that the book would be introduced by two letters, one written by Tolkien and one written by an imaginary friend of his. In his letter to the "readers," Tolkien said that "he received the manuscript and the accompanying cover letter" from a friend who works at the "Institute for Difficult Studies in Derbyshire." In this letter, the friend told Bobyr's Tolkien that "as a result of some unbelievable circumstances" he had been part "of a certain experiment," which "had ended tragically." In addition to "Tolkien's friend," the other participants in the experiment were an Engineer, a Physicist, a Chemist, a Computer Scientist, and a Coordinator, the same cast of characters who appear in Stanislaw Lem's Eden. The origin of the Tolkien's renowned All-powerful Ring was explained scientifically as the Ring having been found when a drill core of basalt was melted. The heroes of the "interlude" record the Ring's history in a series of flashbacks, drawing the conclusion that the Ring is a special "device," "a repository of information, which it releases when subjected to sparks."²

This approach was the translator's idea of how to make it easier to get Tolkien into print. Fortunately, this monstrous plan was not successful, and this hideous hybrid remained a manuscript. Bobyr's work can, however, be viewed as the first Russian novel inspired by The Lord of the Rings. The difference between this and other Russian Tolkienesque literature is that this one is attributed to Tolkien, and not to its real author.

Having failed to publish The Lord of the Rings as Science-Fantasy, Bobyr tried to turn it into Fairy-Fantasy, producing yet another version of the trilogy under her editorship, adding something that finds no corollary at all in Tolkien's works: "The Silver Crown of...