Alice's New Adventures
The story of how Lewis Carroll's masterpiece came to the Soviet Union is almost as strange as the book itself.

By Victor Sonkin
Published: March 9, 2007

Earlier this year, the world celebrated the 175th anniversary of the birth of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known under his pen name, Lewis Carroll. Virtually anyone who loves books can tell you that Carroll is the author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," a masterpiece of children's literature that has been translated into more than 100 languages, including Russian.

But few people know the story of how "Alice" appeared in Russia -- a fantastic tale with several twists and turns that are almost as absurd as the book itself.

"Alice" first came out in Russian nearly 130 years ago, but back then, it seemed the book would not fare well here. The anonymously translated version of 1879 was met with confusion and bewilderment. "Tiring, most boring, most confused sick delusions of a little girl"; "absurd dreams may be recounted in a family circle for fun, but they are not published, illustrated and presented to the general public"; "one can hardly imagine anything less sensible and more absurd than this fairy tale; all mothers are urged to disregard this worthless fantasy" -- such was the critical consensus in Russia at the time.


The absurd world of Lewis Carroll, which immediately fascinated readers in Britain, was quite alien to readers elsewhere. Moreover, children's literature in Russia at the time tended to be extremely moralistic and plot-based, and Carroll's wild imagination did not fit in. As time went by, several new translations of "Alice" appeared; one of them (frankly, a bad one) was done by the young Vladimir Nabokov. But for almost a century, "Alice" was not a household name to Russians, even though translators tried their best to replace obscure English hints and poetic phrasings with more accessible Russian ones.

By the late 1960s, the background for a Carroll revival was ripe. There had been plenty of children's poetry written in the nonsense manner (or translated into Russian from other languages) so the genre was no longer shocking to readers. Furthermore, Soviet life itself was increasingly absurd -- and though absurdism was not officially encouraged in literature for adults, readers had softened to it.

That was when a strange, completely Carrollian thing happened.

An official responsible for non-Soviet socialist literature was leafing through the list of books recently published in the countries of the "people's democracy," as the Eastern European satellite states were called back then, when he stumbled upon the Bulgarian publication of a book about a girl called Alice. Thinking it was a Bulgarian book, he ordered a Russian translation to be done and published in Sofia for future importing into the Soviet Union (this was a standard procedure for such publications, which were sponsored by Soviet money). The Bulgarians were surprised, and it took some effort and persuading to find someone to translate the book from English and not from Bulgarian.

That translator happened to be Nina Demurova, a university instructor of English and translation who had long been fascinated by Carroll. Thus, the first postwar Russian version of "Alice" appeared in 1967 in Sofia, with illustrations by Bulgarian artist Petar Chuklev; Nina Demurova translated the bulk of the text, while the poems were flamboyantly translated by Dina Orlovskaya. It turned out that Demurova, a relative unknown at the time, had unwittingly outmaneuvered several famous translators who were fighting for the right to translate "Alice" at prestigious children's publishing houses in Moscow. (There's also a persistent urban legend that Demurova is actually Bulgarian.)

More at: http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/174970/