In 1923, a Russian printer exiled in Berlin publishedAnya in Wonderland. In many respects, the book resembled Lewis Carroll’s Alice, but the translator changed many characters’ names, and the nursery rhymes he parodied were Slavic, not British. All of these distortions were deliberate, the work of a young novelist whose reputation for literary playfulness would ultimately rival Carroll’s: Working under a pseudonym – and paid the equivalent of five dollars for his efforts – the translator was Vladimir Nabokov.

The first edition of Anya in Wonderland is one of dozens of artifacts currently on view at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, capturing the curious path that Carroll’s tale has taken since he first told it to Alice Liddell and her siblings on a boat trip in 1862. Other objects in the exhibition include translations into languages from Afrikaans to Bengali, and editions illustrated by everyone from John Tenniel to Salvador Dali to Ralph Steadman.

 

In Nabokov’s opinion, Alice had to be called Anya in order for Russian readers to relate to her as British readers responded to  Alice, and if the satirized nursery rhymes didn’t sound familiar to Russian ears, they’d lose their quality of satire. In other words, Nabokov made his Wonderland truer to Carroll’s vision by making his text less faithful to Carroll’s writing.

 

The most compelling illustrations of Carroll’s classic are as irreverent as Nabokov’s text. John Tenniel’s pictures for the first British edition puckishly skew traditional Victorian iconography. A century later, Dali renders the Rabbit Hole and the Queen’s Croquet Ground hallucinogenically. And Steadman (most famous for illustrating Hunter S. Thompson’s through-the-looking-glass journalism) stages Alice’s adventures in modern England, rendering the White Rabbit as a harried commuter and showing the Mad Hatter hosting a game show.

These reimaginings are much more than attractive packaging. As Carroll’s Victorian world lapses into history, and his references fall into obscurity, they transport Alice forward through time. They translate Alice into the present tense, much as Nabokov once made her Russian.

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