The Child Image in F. Sologub’s “The Sting of Death” in Zhou Qichao’s Chinese Translation

The article examines the translational reception of the child image in Fedor Sologub’s prose, using as its material Zhou Qichao’s Chinese translation of the short story “The Sting of Death: A Tale of Two Boys” (first published in 1994; reprinted in 2017). The analysis focuses on the figures of Vanya and Kolya, the symbolic meanings they carry in the Russian original, and the specific features of their reconstruction in the Chinese translation. Particular attention is paid to how translation strategies shape the reader’s perception of Vanya and Kolya. The study is conducted with due regard to established traditions in Russian philology concerning the “childhood” theme and the poetics of Sologub’s short prose, which makes it possible to situate the translation within a broader context of intercultural reception of his oeuvre. To address the research tasks, the article employs close reading and comparative analysis: it systematically compares the ways in which the characters are constructed in the original and in Zhou Qichao’s translation, and identifies translational choices in the areas of evaluative lexis, narrative perspective, and the treatment of the text’s symbolic level. The study’s scholarly novelty lies in the fact that Sologub’s “The Sting of Death: A Tale of Two Boys” is, for the first time, specifically examined from the perspective of translational reception in China, and that it is the first to offer a systematic account of how the story’s child figures are received and reconstituted in the Chinese-language context. The findings show that the translator generally seeks to preserve the key symbolic images of Sologub’s text and to reproduce the characters’ speech patterns and characterological traits; at the same time, the Chinese translation noticeably intensifies the contrast between Vanya and Kolya. While broadly oriented toward conveying Sologub’s Symbolist worldview, the translation consists of subtle yet systematic transformations through which the child figures are adapted to the Chinese readership’s emotional expectations and value orientations, and the original oppositions “childhood–death” and “temptation–sacrifice” are re-accentuated.