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Paper short abstract

This article examines the 1965 Soviet publication of Abe Kōbō’s Daiyon Kanpyōki, its passage through censorship, and Arkady Strugatsky’s influential translation. It traces how mistranslation, ideology, and SF debates shaped the novel’s reception across the Communist world.

Paper long abstract

The publication of Abe Kōbō's Daiyon Kanpyōki in the Soviet Union in 1965 represented a significant cultural moment. Although Abe had recently been expelled from the Japanese Communist Party for demanding artistic independence from party ideology, his ambivalent vision of a future where technological progress leads to the complete transformation of society became immensely popular in Khrushchev-era Russia, where the optimistic certainties of Stalinist futurism were slowly beginning to crack.

The novel's central premise that attempts to predict and control the future through technology may lead to unintended and irreversible transformations stood in stark contrast to Soviet confidence in planned development. Yet the work managed to pass Soviet censorship, aided by an ideologically orthodox preface written by the translator Arkady Strugatsky under the pseudonym Berezhkov. This strategic framing allowed Abe's complex meditation on revolution and transformation to reach Soviet readers, even as its deeper philosophical implications could be seen to challenge official optimism about planned social development.

The article takes a look at letters and diary entries Arkady Strugatsky wrote during translation process to shed some light on the reasons why he was fascinated with Abe’s SF masterpiece. His translation became a template that shaped reception across multiple Soviet-sphere languages, including Estonian, Latvian, Armenian, Hungarian and Serbian versions. Strugatsky’s mistranslation of the title from "Fourth Interglacial Period" to "Fourth Ice Age” is echoed across the Communist world and clearly delineates a group of translations using Russian as an intermediary language. Looking at the reception of Agu Sisask’s Estonian translation published in 1966 we can see how Abe quickly became a preferred example for those who defended science fiction as a form of “serious literature” which served as a platform for discussion complicated social and philosophical issues.

The study demonstrates how literary traditions can develop distinctive approaches to Japanese literature through personal choices of translators, creating alternative canons that differed from dominant Western patterns (English translation of Daiyon Kanpyōki was published much later). By tracing how Japanese science fiction found audiences across the Communist world, the article reveals translation as a dynamic process of cultural dialogue that continued across ideological divisions.