Translations of The Lord of the Rings into Russian

Many Russian translations of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings have been made, starting with illegal samizdat printings. Versions were circulated from 1965; an abridged version of volume 1 appeared in 1982; and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many versions were printed, each with its own merits and demerits.

History


The first effort at publication was made in 1965, but to comply with literary censorship in Soviet Russia, the work was considerably abridged and transformed. The ideological danger of the book was seen in the "hidden allegory 'of the conflict between the individualist West and the totalitarian, Communist East, while Marxist readings in the west conversely identified Tolkien's anti-industrial ideas as presented in the Shire with primitive communism, in a struggle with the evil forces of technocratic capitalism.

Russian translations of The Lord of the Rings circulated as samizdat and were published only after the collapse of the Soviet Union; they then came out in great numbers to satisfy the demand from Tolkien fandom in Russia. Many unofficial and partly fragmentary translations are in circulation. The first translation appearing in print was volume 1 by A. A. Kistyakovsky and V. S. Muravyov in 1982.