Research into cultural transfer as an extension of German studies

Literary studies within the methodological paradigm of research into cultural transfer strives to distance itself both from traditional national philologies (e.g. Russian Studies, Ger-man Studies) and from classical comparative studies. The literary system of a given cultural sphere (once known as “national literature”) is only describable in relation to its experience of foreign culture and exchange with the literary systems of other cultures and languages. Fun-damentally, it is not about a dialogue between great minds but a dialogue between entire liter-ary systems and cultures which receive something foreign, take it up and “digest” it (as Jurij Lotman puts it), and then sometimes tranfers it back to its original cultural sphere in a new version, transformed by the receiving culture. In order to illuminate these processes, studies into cultural transfer investigate paths along which transfers occur, as well as instances of mediation and mediators (people such as translators, publishers, editors; institutions such as publishing houses, academies etc.; media such as newspapers, series of books etc.) The signif-icance of such mediating figures, all of which perform individual acts of selection and trans-formation, is analysed in the article on the exemplary basis of the first German edition of Dos-toyevsky.