Losing the Words: Translation and Transfiguration in Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo da Vinci

• In Event: Translating Fictions

Abstract

This paper traces the theme and problem of translation through Dmitry Merezhovsky’s historical novel The Gods Arisen. Leonardo da Vinci (Voskresshie bogi [Leonardo da Vinchi], 1900). A multilingual text whose characters are obsessed with the mutual translatability of faiths, The Gods Arisen (no less obsessively) seeks an alchemy of language, where words might gain a prophetic power to reveal the essential. Extending Irene Masing-Delic’s illuminating account of Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo as an early figure of Symbolist “life-creation [zhiznetvorchestvo],” I highlight acts (and omissions) of translation in the novel that self-consciously test the Russian language as a medium for this utopian project.

Author

• Chloe Kitzinger, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey