Virtue in Translation: English Novel in Eighteenth-Century Russia Lisa Zunshine

Using as a springboard the eighteenth-century French and English debates about the role that entertaining genres (such as the amatory novel) should play in the development of the national culture, my paper examines the translation of such debates onto the Russian literary scene of the second part of the eighteenth century. Particularly, as I look at several translations of Richardson's Pamela available to eighteenth-century Russian readers, I explore the contemporary Russian critics' reaction to the British attempts to define the good novels of Richardson and Fielding in opposition to the bad French romances and to the equally suspect, French-influenced, novels of Behn and Haywood.