The Buddha in Muslims’ worldview: the essay-article “The Buddha” by Leo Tolstoy in Tatar and Persian translations

The article provides a comparative and contrastive analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s essay “The Buddha” in Tatar and Persian translations. We briefly describe the history of “The Buddha” creation and characterize the Tatar translation of Leo Tolstoy’s work, made at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the Persian translation, carried out much later. In addition, in a concise form, we present creative portraits of the Tatar and Persian translators, providing their biographical data. On the one hand, the conceptual and substantive “core” of the article reflects the need to highlight, based on textual examples, the history of Tatar and Persian appeals to Leo Tolstoy; on the other hand, it seeks to understand the strategy of translation skills oriented towards the exact rendering of the Russian original. Both translations can be classified as adequate. At the same time, in some cases, there is “subjectivization” of Tolstoy’s philosophical-religious and figurative-literary wording, due to the fact that the translators belong to the area of Eastern spiritual and cultural traditions. The article identifies some particular research problems. In the Tatar part, they are associated with the importance of studying the life and work of Nazip Khalfin (1886–1937), the translator of “The Buddha” (there is still very scarce information about him). In the Persian part, similarly, it is necessary to collect and systematize information about Arbob Rukhi (1914–1973), a figure of Iranian culture, the translator of “The Buddha” (and other works of Russian and Western classics). The gaps in their biographies and oeuvre are due to the historical events. In one case, for Tatar culture, they were caused by the tragic circumstances of the October Revolution of 1917 (repressions against the Tatar intellectual elite, anti–Muslim propaganda, the change of the Tatar alphabet); in the other, by certain ideological “excesses” that arose in Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (at the same time, the attitude to social changes that it brought about is beyond any doubt).