Laurence Sterne and his Readers in Early Soviet Russia

Abstract This monograph examines the early Soviet reception of Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. It is difficult to imagine a phenomenon more alien to the Bolshevik rhetoric of total reorganization of society than the whimsical world of Sterne’s fiction. Nevertheless, it was precisely this apparent incongruity that made Sterne—whom Nietzsche once called ‘the freest writer of all times’—so attractive to his Soviet readers in the first two decades after the 1917 Revolution. Sterne’s works, with their paradoxical form, introspective humour, and apology for creative freedom, offered a form of refuge from prescriptive and totalising systems. By reconstructing individual readerly encounters within wider biographical and institutional contexts, the book interprets Sternean reception as part of the larger history of the survival of intellectual autonomy in early Soviet Russia. It presents previously unpublished archival materials: translations, reviews, illustrations, scholarly articles, lectures, notes and editorial correspondence, as well as responses to Sterne’s texts in diaries and private letters. Drawing on book history, translation studies, and reader-response criticism, the study situates Sterne’s reception within the structures that shaped literary life in the 1920s and 1930s, shedding light on the everyday life of readers and translators. It also reassesses Viktor Shklovsky’s engagement with Sterne and recovers a number of overlooked figures in the history of Soviet world literature.