Huck Finn’s Adventures in the Land of the Soviet People

Mark Twain enjoyed immense popularity in Russia from the moment his writings became available in translation starting in 1872. The prerevolutionary fascination with his works only intensified after the emergence of the Soviet State, as Twain's critical stance towards the realities of American life, his antiracism, and his disdain for organized religion, made him extremely palatable to the new socialist government. Between 1918 and the end of 1958, more than 10.2 million copies of his books were published in the USSR. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer dominated the market with eighteen editions during that same period, but Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was quite popular as well. This essay focuses on Daruzes’s popular 1955 translation of Huck Finn in order to examine and challenge Sarukhanyan’s conclusions about the universal embrace and deep intercultural understanding of the novel in the Soviet Union. A comparison with the 1911 translation by Mikhail Engelgardt helps highlight the problems in the Russian representation of Twain’s heroes and topics, and the effects of specific translation choices on the overall message of the text