Reception of Henry James’s novel “The Wings of the Dove” in a foreign-language environment

Abstract

The reception of a literary work in a foreign culture continues to be a topical issue for both literary scholars and linguists. Researchers study the facts of the texts’ primary and subsequent reception and their entry into a new language environment. The first translations of Henry James’s novels into Russian appeared at the end of the 19^th century (“The Portrait of a Lady” and “Daisy Miller”). In the 1950s–60s, Russian literary criticism believed that the writer preached sophisticated psychologism, a cult of form, that he was far away from the current problems of life. It was in the second half of the 20^th century, when Henry James’s novels and stories were available to Russian readers, that the importance of the American writer’s work in world literature became obvious. This is evidenced by the international conference “Henry James Today”, held by the American University of Paris in 2002. The article shows that in one of his best novels “The Wings of the Dove”, James revealed a more complex view of the inner world of man and the nature of his perception of reality. We continue the study of the writer’s psychological mastery and show the variety of interpretations of the novel “The Wings of the Dove” given by Japanese and French scholars.