Intersemiotic Translation As A Special Type Of A Cultural Dialogue

Abstract

The article is devoted to interpretation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace in different cultures of the world through some interlingual translations and mostly through its reinterpretations by means of non-verbal “languages” of various semiotic nature. Intersemiotic translation is considered to be a new interdisciplinary area in Translation Studies enhancing the formation of a hypertext inspired and generated by the primary literary text. Secondary texts and works of art based on the original Tolstoy’s novel are described as possible solutions to the hermeneutic task of its understanding, which is due to the importance of the object of translation for the national and global culture, as well as changes in the cultural, historical and political context of the novel’s “life”. The objects of the present analysis include such intersemiotic novel’s interpretations as films, theatre plays, cartoons, music pieces, songs, pictures / images, comics, ekphrasis, memes, etc. The description of the novel’s secondary versions proves the interdisciplinary of intersemiotic translation, reveals the integration between semiotics and translation and provides the material contributing to the questions concerning the limits of original translatability, the nature and size of intersemiotic translation units, the semiotic conditions of such type of translation and the degree of primary text adaptation.

Keywords: Intersemiotic translationfictioninterpretationadaptationTolstoy

Introduction

The year of 1959 was featured by the publication of Jakobson’s (1959) article On Linguistic Aspects of Translation with his pioneering semiotic approach to translation taxonomy. That was the time when the term intersemiotic translation started its controversial way in the Translation Studies context. Nowadays, intersemiotic translation can be seen as “a cognitive artefact”, scaffolding “creativity in arts in different time scales” and “providing a scenario for the emergence of new and surprising semiotic behaviour” (Queiroz & Atã, 2019, pp. 298-299). The general and universal criteria for defining and evaluating intersemiotic translations have not been determined yet (Damaskinidis, 2016), therefore, the interpretations and evaluations of such translations can continue beyond limit.

Problem Statement

Literary texts, which we define as “strong” texts of culture, are texts known to the majority of world readers’ community; they are included in the various educational syllabi and characterised by the proneness to reinterpretation, as they accumulate “their” cultural information and memory and transmit this information to the representatives of “other” cultures, thus playing a crucial role in the interaction of the world’s cultures. Each new translation of a literary text performed by one or more translators does not constitute an orthogonal meander (a kind of “translation meander”) with the already existing translations, embodying the highest degree of strict regular repeatability in the translation of one text (translatability). In practice, the original text and its versions of various semiotic nature do not posit a space of identical meanders, but rather a complex and multi-coloured mosaic of interrelated and interconnected texts with a unifying semantic basis. The probable multiplicity of versions of one original text when translated into different foreign languages and into the same language by different translators during the “life” of the original piece of literature is a natural attribute of literary texts, directly related to the creative personality of the translator / interpreter, as well as to the aesthetic “strength” of the original text (see in detail: Razumovskaya, 2018).

The high aesthetic potential of a “strong” text, such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace , suggests interpretation of the original not only by means of the other verbal systems (interlinguistic translation), but also by means of a semiotic system of non-linguistic nature. In this case, the fiction original is strongly subject to intersemiotic translation. In the world cultural context in most cases, Tolstoy’s texts are available to the audience in various secondary forms, i.e. in translation or in films or other works of art, or in tertiary ones when the new works are based on novel’s intersemiotic translations.

Kaźmierczak (2018) argues that “when a film, a graphic novel, a computer game, a song, an opera, etc. is translated from language to language <it is not just> intersemiotic translation, <but> interlingual translation in the process of which it is obligatory to take into account other semiotic codes / layers constituting the work” (p. 26).

Research Questions

The article is focused on interpretation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace by means of semiotic systems of various nature. The information ambiguity (and strength of the text to be translated) implies the necessity of profound decoding of a text content in the process of understanding and creates unlimited possibilities for interpreting of the content in the perception of an original text by its reader (a reader belonging to the original culture) and in decoding the text by a translator in the translation process (Razumovskaya, 2019, p. 207).

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of the present study is to analyse different intersemiotic translations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace , mostly non-verbal ones proving the hypothesis that self-recurrence of this text in different cultures and through plenipotentiary means reinforces its standing at the node of cultural grids forming a kind of hypertext, which unites all versions of this masterpiece. Considering the nature of intersemiotic translation, Jakobson (1959) included in the respective semantic field the concept of transmutation and determined the direction of transformation mainly from the verbal text to the non-verbal one. The first Jakobsonian term (intersemiotic translation) reflects the direction of the translation-interpretation process (transition from one semiotic system to another), the second term (transmutation) informs about the essence of this process – qualitative transformation of one object (the text of the original) into another (the text of the translation). We shall redefine this non-verbal translation as transmutation of the original novel through visual, auditory, cinematographic channels.

Research Methods

To construe the intersemiotic interpretations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace the authors used comparative, structural and descriptive methods. The well-known piece of Russian literature is analysed through its realisations in the forms of films, opera, songs, comics, memes, etc. Interpretation is the translator’s (the concept of “translator” is used in its broadest sense) ability to introduce the meaning of the source text into the context of the new linguistic world, a process of linguistic cross-enrichment and penetration into the meanings of different culture, as well as conveying the text information by means of other semiotic systems by means of various artistic forms.

Findings

War and Peace as a “strong” text of Russian and world culture

The works of Tolstoy were created in an era of profound historical changes in the life of Russia and the whole world and therefore marked a new stage in the development of literature. He was the first Russian writer to achieve the widest readership throughout Europe, and the first European writer to gain popularity in India, Japan and China during his lifetime (Motylyova, 1991, p. 131). At the beginning of 1869, the Moskovskiye Vedomosti newspaper informed its readers that the last volume of the novel War and Peace had come out, and this publication aggrandized ​​its author as the head of Russian literature.

During Tolstoy’s life, the novel was published 12 times in the Russian language (twice as separate books and ten times in collected works), once in Polish and twice in Finnish – all in Russia; abroad it was published 76 times in thirteen countries (Zaydenshnur, 1989). Following Tolstoy’s death the novel was published six more times. So, before October 1917, 18 editions of the novel were published in Russia. In the USSR, War and Peace was the most published work in 1918-1986: the total circulation totals 312 editions and amounts to 36,085 million copies (Nemirovsky & Platova, 1987, p. 303). The writer’s worldwide popularity during his lifetime is due, first of all, to the fact that readers in Western Europe and the USA got to know his main works immediately, in the shortest possible time – in the second half of the 1880s. According to the researchers, Russian literature reached western audience at a cosmic speed and immediately stamped itself as a significant and longstanding cultural phenomenon. Its content, its moral and philosophical problems went far beyond the scope of literature and Russian realities (Motylyova, 1991; Orwin, 2017).

Russian literature researchers have repeatedly stated that this Russian novel caused an extraordinary expansion of the narrative: in terms of both portraying human characters and fates, and involving the public from different countries in reading the novel, which continues to-date. Thus, it was Tolstoy who brought the art of novel writing beyond the traditional limits of depicting private life only, to new epic dimension. The penetration of the novel as a “strong” text of Russian culture into a wide space of world culture and its undoubtful influence on the world literary process became possible with the publication of its secondary versions in foreign languages. On the other hand, it is the ability for continuous reinterpretation that testifies to the text’s “strength” and largely determines its further “fate”.

The UNESCO translation database Index Translationum (section Literature & Translation ) contains information that Tolstoy took his deserves place in the list of the most translated authors in the world; the list includes 50 names and Tolstoy is 23^rd with 2267 entries. The specified database and many other sources indicate that the novel has been repeatedly translated into most languages ​​of the world. The obvious manifoldness of the Tolstoy text in translation (observed even within the intralingual translation) indicates not only the continued interest of readers, publishers, critics, but also its apprehensible difficulty to be translated by means of other languages ​​and cultures. Each secondary foreign language text, despite its differences from other translated texts, played a certain role in the “fate” of the Tolstoy’s original novel outside of Russia. It is worth noting that the creation of each specific translation of the novel or the whole history of its translations into one of the foreign languages ​​may be the subject of a separate study. In this article, we dwell only on some most important cases of the appearance of foreign translations of a novel in Russia and abroad.

It is known that the first country in which readers became acquainted with War and Peace in translation was the Czech Republic. The Czechs (and, in particular, the scientist and statesman T.G. Masarik) perceived Tolstoy as an indisputable genius of literature being outside the literary process. The Czech translation of the novel was published in parts in the Progress magazine in 1873, but the translator’s name has not been found (Peshkova et al., 2018). Six years later (in 1879), the Publishing House Hachette (Paris) published the first French translation of the novel, whose distribution and popularity were largely promoted by I.S. Turgenev. The title page did not have the name of the translator, only the pseudonym – Une Russe , under which there was the name of Princess I. Paskevich, who received (as is traditionally believed and was indicated in the subtitle of the novel) permission to translate the novel from the very author, although there has not been found any reliable evidence of such permission. Nevertheless, this translation was of great importance for getting readers all over the world to know a masterpiece of Russian literature and for the world fame of its author. This first French translation served the intermediary text to make first translations of War and Peace into English, Hungarian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish and other languages. During Tolstoy’s times, this translation was republished in France annually in numerous reprints, although it was not the only one. The last known French translation made by M. Le Met and T. Lovi was published by Éditions Temps & Périodes in 2008.

At the moment, there are ten full-text English-language translations of the novel. The first translation into English was made by C. Bell from the French version (by I. Paskevich) and published in 1885-1886. In 1898, the American translator N. Dole released his English version, which became the second among English translations, and in 1904 another American translator, L. Wiener, created the third translation. In the same year, Publishing House Heinemann offered readers a translation by C. Garnett, the famous English translator of the Russian classic literature. This translation has become one of the long-livers among the English translations of the novel and played a crucial role in reaching vast Anglophone audience. Garnett’s translation, aimed at the average reader and having lost many of the content-related and stylistic parameters of the original text, was reprinted not for once, and was also used by the authors of subsequent translations of the novel as an exemplary translation. In 1922-23, there was published a translation of the spouses A. and L. Maude. This translation was made when Tolstoy was alive and was probably approved by him. In 1957, Penguin Books published a translation of R. Edmonds, who saved the French passages, which made it possible to convey the atmosphere of life of Russian aristocracy. In 1968, A. Dunnigan, a theatre actress and famous Chekhov translator, made and published the American translation. The novel is subjected to translation in the 21^st century as well. In 2005, the translation by the Englishman A. Briggs was published. In 2007, the New York-based Knopf Publishing House released a translation by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. This version of War and Peace became an important event in the intellectual life of New York and the USA, which is proved by the fact that at the time of translation the movie theatres in New York reran Bondarchuk’s film. In The New York Times blog we read that Tolstoy’s novel is “not just one of the great novels, it is probably the greatest novel in Western literature” (Genis, 2007). In an interview dedicated to his translation, R. Pevear compared Tolstoy’s novel with “a continent that has not yet been discovered,” stating that it is “not reading, but a kind of intellectual test, an examination for intelligence, fulfillment, commitment” (Lagunina, 2007). The translation duet Pevear-Volokhonsky tried to preserve the stylistic structure of Tolstoy’s phrases as accurately as possible, which pass on “the Tolstoy effect” to the secondary text. The translation of the Englishman – E. Bromfield appeared in 2007, too. The 2007 translations have significant differences not only because of the translation strategies and principles chosen by the translators, but also because different texts of the original were used as a basis. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky used the Moscow edition of 1962, whereas E. Bromfield worked with the “original version” based on parts of the novel published in the Russian Messenger in 1865–66, which were later revised and supplemented by Tolstoy himself. The “strength” of the Tolstoy text was mirrored by the “fate” of his translations. In 2010, Oxford University Press in a well-known series of Oxford World’s Classics published a translation of A. and L. Maude revised by A. Mandelker (professor at City University of New York). The changes were the result of a modern approach to the text of fiction and consisted in the restoration of the French text, the elimination of English names, the addition of an expanded commentary and introduction that informed readers of the literary and historical context of the novel. Each of the existing English translations of the novel has its followers. One of the interesting discussions on this topic is presented in a blog Tolstoy Therapy devoted to the use of novel translations for psychotherapeutic purposes.

The head of the Tolstoy’s textual school Zaydenshnur (1989) admitted that foreign readers had got acquainted with the novel not only in full-text versions, but also in excerpts entitled as Napoleon and Alexander, Physiology of War, Death of Prince Andrei, Philosophy of History, Napoleon Russian Campaign, Ball at the Naryshkins .

The novel’s translating into the languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR is a story of its own: writers from national republics solved the challenging task of retaining the particular features of the style of the great Russian writer in their translations. In 1935-1940, War and Peace translated by S. Zaryan came out in the Armenian language, and in 1937 the first two volumes were published in Ukrainian. In 1946, S. Bektursunov translated the first volume of the novel into the Kyrgyz language. In 1948, the first two volumes of War and Peace translated by S. Mukanov and T. Kurgavin were published in Kazakh. A major event in the cultural life of Azerbaijan was the publication of a novel in the Azerbaijani language. In Estonia, in 1945-1946, the third edition of War and Peace was published. In 1960, the writer N. Mordinov began translating War and Peace into the Yakut language. Thus, the novel was translated into most languages ​​of the USSR. And the existence of all foreign-language translations confirms that the novel is a “strong” text of Russian culture and literature, representing a multilingual cultural phenomenon in the world’s cultural space.

War and Peace in intersemiotic forms: the hypertext long-lasting creation

As well as the appearance of foreign translations, the creation of the television and film versions of the novel also provides convincing proofs of its aesthetic value and “strength”, although War and Peace was filmed less than another “strong” work by Tolstoy – Anna Karenina . The longevity of the original text (the whole manuscript amounts to more than 5,000 sheets), the complexity of the plot lines, the set of main and secondary characters (there are about 600 of them in the novel, of which nearly 200 are historical persons) determine the objective difficulty in reproducing Tolstoy’s text as films. All these factors necessitated directors to limit themselves only to certain plots and scenes, reduce the number of characters and change their hierarchy (which was manifested in the names of the films).

The first films based on the novel were created in pre-revolutionary Russia. The first known film adaptation (with the retained name War and Peace ) appeared in 1913. The director of the version was P. Chardynin, and the role of Andrei Bolkonsky was played by I. Mozzhukhin. In the film adaptation of 1915 (directed by Y. Protazanov and V. Gardin), Mozzhukhin also acted as Bolkonsky, and O. Preobrazhenskaya became Natasha Rostova. In 1915, P. Chardynin shot his second version of the novel, which was released under the name Natasha Rostova. The main characters were embodied by the ballerina V. Caralli and actor V. Polonsky. All three of these screen versions, due to the technical capacities, were black-and-white and mute.

After the era of silent cinema, Tolstoy’s novel drew the attention of filmmakers only in the 1950s. The director of the 1956 War and Peace co-produced by the United States and Italy ( Paramount Pictures ) was K. Vidor. Surprisingly, it was the only adaptation of Tolstoy’s masterwork in the past forty-one years. The leading roles were played by world cinema stars: A. Hepburn (Natasha Rostova), G. Fonda (Pierre Bezukhov), M. Ferrer (Andrei Bolkonsky). Vidor’s film was repeatedly nominated for various awards and got them, although it did not enjoy the expected box office success. It is noteworthy that this film adaptation was the most successful in the USSR (the film was shown in 1959), directly contributing to the appearance of the film by S. Bondarchuk. And in 1963 the British television movie War and Peace (directed by S. Narizano) was shot.

War and Peace directed by S. Bondarchuk became a cultural event on a global scale in 1965-1967, with Bondarchuk playing the role of Pierre Bezukhov himself. It was also starring L. Savelieva, V. Tikhonov, V Stanitsyn, V. Lanovoi, O. Efremov and others. The film consisted of four parts (Andrei Bolkonsky, Natasha Rostova, 1812, Pierre Bezukhov) and had one of the biggest budgets in the history of Soviet cinema. In 1969 the film was awarded Oscar in the nomination Best Foreign Language Film , as well as the Golden Globe Award in the same nomination. This screenage was a victory in the cinematic Cold War, as it “was seen by tens of millions, both at home and abroad, garnering the largest foreign audiences for any Soviet film”; it “won the coveted Oscar. It was highly praised in France, the center of European cinema. It became a cult classic in Japan. Today in Russia there has been a favorable reevaluation of the film <…> It is hard to imagine a greater film based on Tolstoy’s masterpiece or one that better evokes the might and grandeur of Russia” (Youngblood, 2014).

In the UK, in 1972, the series War & Peace was directed by J. Davies. In 2007, an international team of filmmakers (from Germany, Russia, Poland, France, Italy), under the directorship of R. Dornhelm and B. Donnison, created a new television version of the novel with the traditional name War and Peace . Another British film version was the dramatic mini-series BBC which came on screens in 2016 and consisted of six miniatures. Director T. Harper invited such famous actors as J. Norton, L. James, P. Dano. This television movie repeats the original plot, and also presents a number of scenes which were in drafts of the novel. In an interview for RIA Novosti , V. Tolstoy, the great-great-grandson of the writer, emphasized the responsible attitude of the filmmakers to the author and the text of the novel: “By all means, this film is a bit unusual for the Russian reader and viewer opinion about Russia, about the novel, but, nevertheless, from my point of view, it is cautious to the author of the text. This is exactly what I consider to be critical in any film adaptation attempt” (RIA, 2016).

In the USSR, in 1959, well-known film director G. Danelia made a short film based on an excerpt from a novel. This film novel, called Also People , is dedicated to human relations and tells about the meeting of Russian and French soldiers in the winter forest in 1812. Directors M. Pankratova and A. Grachev created short films from excerpts from the novel, combined into the War and Peace trilogy, in 2012.

The intersemiotic translation can bring in new ideological struggles, when the adherents of the classic interpretation give way to momentary sentiments. Such is the fate of the musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (an adaptation of a 70-page segment that cost 14 million dollars). The musical was first shown in October 2012 at the off-Broadway theatre Ars Nova and became a kind of adaptation of the classic work. The plot is built around one fragment from the novel – a naive heroine’s crush for Anatole Kuragin and the growing despair of Pierre, perplexed in his search of the meaning of life. Composer and libretto author Dave Malloy said in an interview: “We call it electro-pop opera. We ourselves came up with such a definition. For music we used different sources, we were inspired by the Russian classics of the 19^th century: Tchaikovsky, Borodin; from later ones I can name Rachmaninov... To this we added rock opera and avant-garde music. By such musical means, we tried to express the epic story described by Leo Tolstoy: human relations against the backdrop of war” (Afisha. NYC, 2016). O. Leontovich writes about the Broadway version of the musical (The Imperial Theatre): “The show premiered in November 2016 and ended in a scandal when the black actor Okieriete Onaodowan appointed for the role of Pierre was replaced by the white actor Mandi Patinkin. The replacement gave rise to a Twitter campaign of angry protestors who saw it as racial discrimination” (Leontovich, 2019, p. 406), and the show did not last for a year also due to a “chaotic mixture of different semiotic signs” belonging to different epochs in Russian mass culture, like vodka and Pussy Riot , “the use of which is not justified by any in-depth motives” (Leontovich, 2019, p. 409).

The musical adaptation of War and Peace as opera was as grandiose as the novel itself. S. Prokofiev dated his idea to write an opera back to 1935. The libretto was created by the composer and his wife on the basis of the original text with the involvement of various historical sources (works by E. Tarle, D. Davydov’s diaries, etc.) and literary ones (the opera contains verses by M. Lomonosov, V. Zhukovsky, K. Batyushkov).

The maximum possible representation of the problem issues of the novel in the opera music was recreated in thirteen scenes with a choral prologue, with 73 characters, including a large number of episodic ones, as well as figures who had real historical prototypes – Napoleon, Alexander I, Kutuzov, etc. A peculiar feature of the opera’s libretto is its “fragmentation”, that is, events occurring between the scenes are often not shown, they have to be thought up on the basis of the actors’ remarks – this enabled a wide coverage of the historical context and helped to enhance the epic sound of the opera. When creating the libretto, Prokofiev set a special task to bring the world of the opera as accurately as possible to the original source – Tolstoy’s novel. As a consequence, the libretto was written in prose with the inclusion of many fragments of direct speech from the novel. On June 7, 1945, a concert performance of the opera took place in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. The first part of the opera was premiered on June 12, 1946 at the Leningrad Maly Opera House. In 1955 (after the death of the composer), it staged the full version of the opera. In 1957, the Musical Theater named after Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko hosted the Moscow premiere of the full version of the opera War and Peace , and in 1959 the Bolshoi Theatre did this. The opera criticism touched a number of key questions of intersemiotic translation: (1) What is the unit of this kind of translation? Artistic image? (2) What should be preserved in the secondary text, which has a different semiotic nature, so that it can be said that a translation has been made?

Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace was also staged at the Prague National Opera (1948), Florence (1953), the Sofia National Opera (1957), the Sydney Opera House (1973), and the State Opera House in Nuremberg in Germany (2018). The idea of ​​adapting the opera for the television was realised by foreign directors: in 1991 – H. Burton (Great Britain), in 2000 – F. Rassillon (France).

Another interesting group of novel’s intersemiotic translations are memes – “an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means with the addendum that these images have text overlain on top, often for a humorous purpose” (Lonnberg et al., 2020, p. 1).

The analysed 119 memes in Russian and English can be grouped into several categories. They were mostly image texts that “enter into a discordant relation with each other, to not be coherent and seamless but to engage the viewer in a process of decoding and meaning-making” (Campbell & González, 2018, pp. 690-691). The first category (with the profuse number of examples – 42) reproaches War and Peace of longevity: the people portrayed are either denying the possibility of reading the whole book, or rejecting reading the “War” parts. One of the long-standing memes is the comic strips Peanuts (the earliest memes dated 1972) portraying Ch. Brown sleeping under War and Peace book and Snoopy which is going to read only a word per day. Though disapproving, these memes reaffirm the strong position of the novel as it is considered the criterion of the classic text which everybody should read whatever time it takes. Some examples (3) have an increased focus on digression from the main plot to convoluted description of picturesque landscape as an example also belong to this category. The second category incorporates pictures (36 memes with ordinary background pictures + 3 memes with images highlighting some other acute problems) bearing the direct quotations from the novel, when placed against the image they acquire the new meaning like the hint to the meaninglessness of some particular war which actualises the unaging sense of Tolstoy’s linchpin. Citations without any pictures in this way emphasise this or that idea, e.g. “Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals”. The third category (12) again deals with the complexity of the novel, pinpointing attention to the abundant use of French in the text for the Russian reader, or making a point of long-winded adverbial participial phrases), attesting to the concinnity of Tolstoy’s style. The next category (7) is focused on the dichotomy of “war” and “peace” and it is distanced from the original novel, though they thrust the two key concepts of the novel into spotlight. The fifth category (6) consists of humorous illustrations for the behaviour of some characters, e.g. showing “Pierre trying to get the letters in his name to add up to 666”. The other memes are few in number, some of them bear the pejorative meaning (3), some, quite the opposite, promote the usefulness of reading (5) or even retell the plot (1). The left 4 examples cannot be united in any category and are miscellaneous in their humorous connotations. There was even an account in Twitter @warnpeacememes devoted specifically to this topic (though it was only active in 2017).

Conclusion

The analysis of Tolstoy’s War and Peace secondary texts creation and their further existence in the national and global cultural spaces is a convincing illustration of the hypothesis that the emergence (semiosis) of secondary texts in the process of translation represents the evolution of information from the original novel, a transmutation mediated by bifurcation (doubling) of original information, its aesthetic energy. The appearance of the secondary interpretation becomes a translation, which is an information transformation and a direct consequence of the information bifurcation process. At the same time, the adaptation of a literary text traditionally involves the elision (information abbreviation, shortening) of the verbal original novel and is accompanied by national cultural and chronological transcoding (information transfer). However, “all meanings derived from a text are actually a derivation from our cognitive experience <…> Whichever way one opts to view such intertextual interplays, transposition of meaning from one medium to another seems to enhance and enrich its semiotic content” (Kesić, 2019, p. 24). Following the ideas of Dusi (2015) we agree that intersemiotic translation as interlingual translation is “questioning and showing what it means to ‘translate’ from one ‘language’ to another, such as from the novel to the medium of film, and to what extent the term translation is used metaphorically or whether it is semantically extended to include a broader notion of translation than that between natural languages” (p. 181).

To sum up, in this work the authors compared and thoroughly analysed a number of realisations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in intersemiotic translations. The exploratory and transformational creativity of these translations allow us to make a conclusion that these secondary or even tertiary texts create a hypertext with the original novel as its core, reaffirming its position among the enduring masterpieces of the Russian literature. Going beyond the verbal cultural space and entering non-verbal space of various nature undoubtably broaden the degree of novel’s translatability and resulting “translatedness”. The genesis (semiosis) of secondary texts with various semiotic nature and degree of information and aesthetic similarity enhances the dialogue of cultures which are involved in translation process and stimulates the formation of polylingual and multimodal hypertext of high cultural value and aesthetic “strength”.

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