Chapter Two. Artsybashev and the ideology of translation

Mikhail Artsybashev's early love for painting, carried through his entire life, may have left a trace in the frequent occurrence and pictorial quality of nature descriptions in his prose, which remained faithful to the landscape of his native province. Sanin was begun by its young author in 1900, and submitted to the prestigious St. Petersburg journal Mir Bozhii in 1903. Among the many, who wrote about Sanin in the years immediately following its publication, some felt that the novelist had renounced ideas he had previously expressed in The Death of Lande , a short novel of 1904 which Artsybashev himself considered his best work. Rabochii Shevyrev , a one-hundred page novel, was published in the second issue of the literary anthology Zemlia in 1909. An abridged translation from an unspecified source, bearing the names of Ling Xiao and Wu Ling, concludes the Sanin saga in republican China. Keywords: Zemlia ; China; Mikhail Artsybashev; Sanin ; The Death of Lande