Articles
The Role of the Magazine “Al-Nafais” (1908–1914) in Promoting Russian Literature in the Middle East
S.Yu. Zavadovskaya
Vostok/Oriens '2014, №2
At the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, the Palestinian-Lebanese-Syrian region became the center of the dissemination of Russian classics in the Middle East and the center of translation from Russian. Russian schools of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society helped it. Khalil Beydas (1875–1947), a graduate of the Russian seminary in Nazareth, in 1908 founded the magazine “Al- Nafais” which he soon renamed “Al-Nafais al-asriyya”. During 1908–1914 in Haifa and then Jerusalem this magazine published many works by Russian writers, particularly by Leo Tolstoy, Alexei Tolstoy, Chekhov among them. Beydas Khalil, Ibrahim Jaber, Antun Ballan and others translated these works into Arabic. The magazine published articles about Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Lomonosov, and other representatives of Russian culture.
Keywords: magazine “Al-Nafais”, Russian literature, translation from Russian into Arabic, Arab popularizers of Russian classics
Pages: С. 43–51
