Did he personally know Capote? On the first Soviet translator of Capote’s short stories

The study throws light on the person of V. Titov, an obscure translator of two short stories by the American writer Truman Capote, published in Russian for the first time in the popular Soviet weekly Nedelya in 1963 and 1964. The material not only succeeds in uncovering Titov’s real name, but also establishes facts of his biography that support the version of a chance encounter with Capote during the latter’s visits to the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. Zakharov believes that Titov was a member of the so-called ‘golden youth,’ a group that interested Capote, who was collecting material for a planned feature in The New Yorker. According to the scholar, the circumstances of their personal acquaintance might have influenced Titov’s decision to familiarize Soviet readers with Capote’s works. The article details the contemporary Soviet censorship conventions for translations of ‘bourgeois authors’ and analyzes special features of Titov’s translations of Capote’s short stories Master Misery and Jug of Silver.