ИСТИНА

The paper dwells on the history of translation, teaching and reception of Ralph Ellison’s works in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. Special attention is paid to the curious fact of the “invisibility” of Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece, the novel Invisible Man, which still remains untranslated and unpublished in Russia. Several Ellison’s short stories and essays were published in Russian before the end of the Soviet period; the best known edition is the collection Korol amerikanskogo loto (King of the Bigo Game), Moscow: Izvestia Publ., 1985 (series “Library of Inostrannaya Literatura magazine”); among other things, it contained V. Golyshev’s translation of the “battle royal” episode from the Invisible Man, probably the most impressive exposure of blatant American racism in the novel, and, therefore, quite allowable from the point of view of the Soviet ideological censorship. The fact that the novel itself remained untranslated and unpublished in the USSR can be explained, besides other things, by Ellison’s satirical depiction of Brotherhood – which was understood as lampooning Communists. It is uncanny, however, that one of the greatest novels of the XXth century has not been translated into Russian either in the 1990-ies or later – although several attempts have been made by some outstanding Russian translators (eg. Victor Golyshev, Alexander Livergant). Trying to explain this paradox, we have to turn to the characteristics of the post-Soviet “literary field” and economics of literature in modern Russia, as well as to the university teaching practices, literary criticism and academic research of Ellison’s works since 1980-es up to nowadays and the way they shaped Ellison’s image in late Soviet and post-Soviet period.