“From the Diary of a Snail” – Problems of a Russian translation in the 1990s

Abstract

Günter Grass’s works were rarely published in the USSR. He and his work were looked at very critically and it was mostly connected with the political views. This situation changed after the fall oft the Soviet regime. Grass became a widely known author. In the Soviet Union, literature was always under censorship, so texts of foreign writers were often changed according to certain criteria. On the basis of the novel “From the Diary of a Snail” the author shows that this (the practice of censorship) had an influence on translations in the early post-Soviet era, in the 1990-ies.