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Abstract: The article examines the history of the unpublished Russian translation of Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost (1935), carried out by Samuil Gurevich. Being an indirect fact of reception of the heritage of John Milton, Odets’s Paradise Lost was also an example of a revolutionary Communist drama, which convincingly showed the collapse of the world of the regular American during the Great Depression. Despite the fact that other plays by Odets were well known to the Soviet reader and viewer, the fate of the American Paradise Lost in the USSR did not work out – just a short excerpt was published from the only translation by S. D. Gurevich (in 1936 in Za Rubezhom magazine), and the stage presentation never took place. The analysis of archival documents showed that Gurevich tried to push the publication of his translation of the play at least twice in the late 1930s. In 1939, the Main Directorate for Control of Spectacles and Repertoire under the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR allowed the play to be staged, it was read at the Moscow Art Theater, but never reached either the reader or the viewer. The translation by Gurevich was mainly distinguished by its accuracy, linguistic ease, and selection of adequate translation equivalents; among his translation transformations, it is important to note the introduction of quotes from Russian culture (A. P. Chekhov, V. V. Vereshchagin) and the change in the social status of the “proletarian” group of characters in the play, who became factory workers (instead of store clerks) in his translation. As a result of the study, three reasons were discovered for the unfavorable fate of the American Paradise Lost in the Land of the Soviets: first, the idea of the world revolution sounding in the play, by the end of the 1930s had already lost its relevance for Soviet ideology; second, the topic of bourgeois decay turned out to be outdated in the context of creation of a new society; and third, the publication of the play was also under the negative influence of the fate of its translator Gurevich.

About the author(s) :

Dmitry N. Zhatkin

Penza State Technological University (Penza, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4768-3518

Vera V. Serdechnaia

Kuban State University (Krasnodar, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8718-3556

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 09.07.2025; date of publication: 29.12.2025

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