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 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.