Ryunosuke Akutagawa in Translations by Natalia Feldman

Ryunosuke Akutagawa has been known in our country for quite some time, and before the emergence of Haruki Murakami, our contemporary who became a new star in the sky of foreign literature in Russia, I think Akutagawa could have been called the most famous Japanese writer of the 20th century among us.

He committed suicide just two years short of the thirty-seven years allotted to geniuses, but left us a grand literary legacy of significant literary importance (and perhaps also in volume).

This book features 42 stories from that legacy, and the selection is based on the following: included in the book are those stories of Akutagawa that were translated by the renowned Soviet Japanologist Natalia Isaevna Feldman (1903 - 1975).

There are good reasons for this: first, in 2023, it marks the 120th anniversary of N. I. Feldman's birth, and the publishing house decided to celebrate this date with the release of her translation book. Second, Natalia Isaevna translated more of Akutagawa's literary prose than all the other Japanologists combined. Third, such a publication structure helps to see the metamorphoses of the perception of Akutagawa in the Russian cultural history and even the socio-cultural changes that have occurred in domestic Japanology...