Translating the Boom: Carlos Fuentes and the Soviet World Literature Project

Abstract This article examines the Soviet reception of the Latin American Boom through the example of one of its leading figures, Carlos Fuentes, and his landmark novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), the first Boom novel to appear in Russian translation. Published amid heightened Soviet efforts to engage culturally with Latin America, Margarita Bylinkina’s translation (1965/67) reshaped the novel’s modernist experimentation and symbolic treatment of national identity to align with the prevailing conventions of Soviet literature. Drawing on archival sources and close textual analysis, I trace Fuentes’s introduction to Soviet readers through strategically selected excerpts and reportage, then analyze how translators and editors navigated the ideological tensions between the novel’s modernist aesthetics and the political imperatives of Thaw-era socialist internationalism. Fuentes’s case reveals the central contradiction of the Soviet world literature project: the state’s aspiration to global literary leadership often clashed with its need to domesticate revolutionary aesthetics.