“Gaining Literary Citizenship”: Translators In The Soviet Literary Bureaucracy Of The 1930s

This paper focuses on the history of the Translators Section in the Soviet Writers Union in the 1930s and demonstrates how, and under what circumstances, literary translation was constructed in the soviet culture of 1930s as a profession and as a separate type of writing activity. The author uses the conceptual framework invented by Sheila Fitzpatrick for the soviet social system to the soviet literary history, and concludes, that translators were ascribed to the writers stratum by the bureaucratic machine of the Soviet Writers Union