The Present-Day Communication between Russia’s National Literatures: Literary Translations and Their Impact

Abstract

Introduction. In recent years, literary translations from languages of Russia’s peoples are becoming rarer and rarer. Without mutual exchanges of spiritual and artistic values minority literatures have every chance to lose their viability. Rationale. The issue uder consideration remains understudied – despite its actual social significance. The goal of the work is to analyze the current situation related to publications of translated works by writers representing peoples of the Russian Federation, to identify causes of their sharp decline, attempts to determine the potential consequences of the latter and somewhat possible solutions of the problem. The work uses the comparative, historical, cultural, and statistical methods. Results. Throughout the last decade, non-Russian literary publications — in Russia’s minority languages — constitute only 2 % of the whole of fiction publications, and published works translated from the same languages hardly constitute a tenth or a thousandth of one percent. The situation is basically caused by the lack of proper interest of state agencies towards literatures and training of professional translators specializing in languages of Russia’s peoples, by the loss of ties between regional writers and the political center, etc. The decrease in publications of translated works significantly reduces their role in the communication of national cultures of our country.