DOMESTICATION AND CULTURAL SUBSTITUTION: UZBEK TRANSLATIONS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC MARKERS IN IVAN BUNIN'S PROSE

Translating Russian classical literature into the agglutinative, Turkic structure of the Uzbek language involves navigating profound linguistic disparities and shared, yet distinct, historical realities. The treatment of ethnographic markers in Ivan Bunin’s prose highlights these intense cross-cultural negotiations. This study offers a rare pragmalinguistic analysis of Bunin’s works in Uzbek translation, demonstrating how Soviet-era institutional paradigms and deep-seated cultural differences dictated a radical adaptation of Russian rural realia through cultural substitution. The research utilizes a qualitative comparative analysis of Bunin’s Russian texts (Antonovskie yabloki, Derevnia, Sukhodol) and their official Uzbek translations. Theories of equivalence by Barkhudarov, Vlakhov, and Florin, alongside Venuti's domestication framework, are applied to evaluate micro-level translation shifts. Uzbek translations exhibit a systemic reliance on domestication. Translators systematically replace Russian material artifacts (e.g., lapti to choriq) and social hierarchies (e.g., barchuk to bekvachcha) with historically familiar Central Asian equivalents, while seamlessly transliterating terms that became common during the Soviet era. This profound domestication maximizes affective resonance and linguistic fluency for the target audience. However, it results in a significant ethnocentric reduction, fundamentally altering the specific socio-historical contours of Bunin’s Tsarist Russian landscape and shifting the "estate topos" into a Turkic cultural paradigm.