The Spectre of Maksim Gorky

The relationship between the Soviet Union and the African continent has increasingly attracted the attention of historians and literary critics alike, with Angola frequently treated as a fruitful case study. This chapter traces the socio-cultural microhistory of the transmission of the work of Maksim Gorky (1868–1936) in Angola––a transmission which underpinned, crucially, the development of a littérature engagé during the struggle for Angolan independence from the Portuguese Empire in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Gorky’s influence on the generation of Angolan writers active in the 1950s and 1960s––often regarded as the Geração Cultura, after the literary bulletin Cultura (1957–1961), which resided at the heart of the cultural movement supporting the drive for independence––has been explicitly acknowledged.

With José Luandino Vieira as a case study, this chapter seeks to determine the ways in which Maksim Gorky’s work influenced, through processes of translation, transmission, and adaptation, a critical moment in the emergence of an Angolan national literary culture. Through comparative analyses between source and target texts, and drawing on extant scholarship of translation and ideology, this chapter analyses the ‘degrees of mediation’ between Gorky’s work and its instrumentalization by the 1950s generation of Angolan authors, and Luandino Vieira specifically. The ‘degrees of mediation’ traced in this paper fall into two main categories: first, both the translation of the Russian author into Brazilian Portuguese––with particular emphasis on the novel Mother (1906)––and its transnational dissemination across the Atlantic; second, in light of the translations then available to Angolan authors, the transposition of aspects of Gorky’s oeuvre into the early writings of José Luandino Vieira.