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Q:
How were you first introduced to the novels and ideas of Ayn Rand?
Costygin:
After secondary school, I entered the Medical-Military Academy in St.
Petersburg to get more a more solid base for my philosophical research.
That is where I started to read novels by Gabriel Markes, Vladimir Nabokov,
James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Umberto Ecco, Herman Hesse, Robert Heinlein
and others. So I was ready to start some project in philosophy or literature
when, during the summer of 1991 in St. Petersburg, I met Ken Schoolland,
a professor of economics from Hawaii and a libertarian. There were lots
of disputes between the two of us about economics (capitalism vs. socialism),
politics and philosophy, but after three days I was converted into a free
market and free mind supporter. He arranged to send Atlas Shrugged,
The Fountainhead and several other books to me a couple months
later. In fact, he was not the first one who had mentioned Ayn Rand’s
books to me. I had heard Ayn Rand mentioned by someone else a few months
before, during the spring. The person’s name was Renée Giere, and
she told me that I should definitely read Ayn Rand. But that did not make
much sense for me at the time—I didn’t even realize that "Ayn Rand"
was an author’s name. So I almost forgot about it. But I remembered the
name immediately after I got the books from Ken.
Q:
How did you get involved in translating Ayn Rand’s novels?
Costygin:
I was shocked by Atlas Shrugged but even more shocked by We
the Living when I realized that the writer was born and lived in St.
Petersburg. I started to ask whether Rand’s books were available in Russian,
and found out that nobody—not even professors of American literature—had
ever heard of the name. So I had no choice but to start translating her
writings on my own.
Q:
So We the Living was your first attempt to translate Rand back
into Russian?
Costygin:
We the Living was the simplest. The We the Living translation
took about a year to complete, and then it took me almost one more year
to publish it. 50, 000 copies had been printed by the end of 1993. Two
years later, I got a call from one man from Moscow who had done the same
thing at the same time and also without really knowing who would be interested
in publishing it. Recently, I was informed that the same thing at the
same time had been done by a small magazine in Voronezh. So there were
at least three translations of We the Living into Russian! Two
of them were published, the first appearing in the magazine and then mine,
but neither got much attention. In the meantime I started to translate
The Fountainhead which was finished in two years, by the end of
1994, and it took six more months to publish it. There were 5,000 copies
printed by the end of 1995.
Q:
How well did they sell?
Costygin:
The worst and hardest experience was after We the Living was published.
The market had changed and I was able to sell only 15,000 of the 50,000
copies. After sitting in storage in the printing house for a year, the
rest of the copies were cut into raw material because I had no money to
pay for the warehouse. I had given several hundred copies to the school
libraries for free, and so nobody was interested in paying money for books
that had been distributed to the libraries for free. So, to the present
date, Ayn Rand’s name is unknown in Russia. In two years, only half of
The Fountainhead press run had been sold.
Q:
How long did it take you to translate Atlas Shrugged and what kinds
of problems did you run into?
Costygin:
Atlas Shrugged was next in line. The translation took two
and a half years, and by October 1997, 1,000 copies were published. It
was very interesting to translate Rand into Russian for a number of reasons.
Firstly, I just love her ideas and heroes. Second, she was not only thinking
in Russian but also has a Russian mentality, so it was easy to translate
her ideas back into Russian. Third, her harmony of style and content defines
the rhythm of the novel, and it was a challenge to preserve that in Russian.
Q:
Did you do all the translating yourself or did you have help?
Costygin:
What I would do is a rough translation. Then after reviewing it, and after
I liked the overall melody, rhythm and characters in Russian, a real professional
editor and proofreader would fix all the details—the grammar, geography,
etc. Then I would review it all over again, working mostly on small details
to tighten the harmony of the narrative, and the editor and proofreader
would pick it up again. Normally, a book makes three such cycles through
the editing process.
Q:
Did you get permission from the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) to translate
Atlas Shrugged? If so, can you tell us what were the terms of the
agreement?
Costygin:
I’ve got a contract for the rights to the Russian-language publication
for all three Rand books. The conditions were friendly–some prepayment
and 6% of the sales.
Q:
In 1993, ARI and Igra-Tekhnika published The Morality of Individualism,
a Russian-language collection of Rand’s key writings. ARI claims that
they sold out of all 5,000 copies printed in Russian in two days. Aren’t
Russian intellectuals starved for good ideas?
Costygin:
In 1995, The Ayn Rand Institute asked me to reprint The Morality of
Individualism because Igra-Tekhnika was no longer interested. I edited
the book and changed the title to The Concept of Egoism. This edition—again
5,000 copies—was sponsored
by ARI. I still have 2,000 of them available in my warehouse.
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from Full
Context, Vol. 10, No. 7
(March 1998)
Issues of Full
Context containing the full transcripts of our interviews are
available here.
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Related
Links
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Additional
biography from Liberty Conferences |
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