Muscovites’ collective culturally conditioned language identity in “The master and Margarita” and its English translations

The article assesses the possibility of adequately representing in translation the collective culturally conditioned language identity of the 1930s Muscovites satirized in Mikhail Bulgakov’s landmark novel The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov’s original is compared with two of its widely acknowledged English translations produced by Michael Glenny (1967) and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1997), who implemented the mutually opposed translation strategies of domestication and foreignization, respectively. Special attention is given to the Russian linguistic devices the translators found particularly difficult to cope with (personal pronouns and diminutive suffixes, phraseological units with the words god and devil).