E. POE'S DETECTIVE STORIES IN RUSSIAN EDITIONS AT THE TURN OF CENTURIES

Edgar Allan Poe and his creative work have always attracted representatives of different literary schools. In 1895 four different editions of E. Poe's collected works were issued in Russia. The translations in two of them had been made by Konstantin Balmont, another variant had been prepared by Michail Engelhard, the third translator was G. Klepatsky. The latter only published one of the books he had planned, and then he left the literary stage. Balmont's translations proved to be an epoch in the history of E. Poe's Russian reception. In this respect so meaningful they were that even ranked with Baudelaire's French translations in importance. Though being popular with critics, E. Poe's short stories were seen not as a fact of the American literature anymore. Russian readers perceived them as a part of the young Russian symbolist's writing. For K. Balmont the work on the fashionable writer's narrations was a good way to catch the public interest. Balmont described the process of translating E. Poe's stories in his afterword to the collected works: intending to demonstrate all American writer's prose he deliberately disregarded those samples which he considered feeble or unrenderable. K. Balmont was highly interested in the mystic rationality of the detectives Legrand and Dupin, at the same time he reproduced the aesthetics and symbols of ''self-accusation'' stories. This contributed to Poe's image formation in Russia: the writer was associated with ''horror'' stories of fin de siecle. E. Poe's collected edition with M. Engelhard as a translator was issued three times. The number of volumes enlarged and some changes were made, which testifies to Engelhard's evolution in the way he understood the American writer's prose. In the collection of tales translated by Baudelaire at the end of the 19th century E. Poe's ratiocinations were to attract readers and demonstrated the method which led Poe to the Truth. These stories paved the way to less probable ''artificial'' psychological tales and tales of horror. The collected works made by Engelhard was organized in the same way: beginning with ''The Gold Bug'' up to psychological stories and finishing with E. Poe's minor compositions. Engelgardt also followed Baudelaire in his desire to involve all E. Poe's prose. E. Poe's tales are poetic, psychological and at the same time they are full of hoaxes and analyticity based on the deductive approach. Due to this contract there were various views of the American writer's personality and his philosophy, and this is the reason why the Russian translations differed from each other greatly. At the turn of centuries symbolist rendering of the detective stories existed alongside with other translating strategies. But studied altogether they reconstruct E. Poe's prose reception in Russia in that period.