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In a letter to Carlyle from January 1, 1828, Goethe frets about the extent to which his German play about an Italian Renaissance poet, Tasso, "can be considered English" in its English translation. "You will greatly oblige me by informing me on this point," he writes, "for it is just this connection between the original and the translation that expresses most clearly the relationship of nation to nation and that one must above all know if one wishes to encourage a common world literature transcending national limits" (qtd. in Strick 349). Goethe's concern with the fate of his German work in English accentuates his insistence on seeing the processes underlying the creation and proliferation of world literature as ultimately enabling transnational exchange and understanding. As John David Pizer has noted in The Idea of World Literature, Goethe's Weltliteratur in general promotes openness, and enables "the movement of the self toward the Other (28)."1 This inter-personal and international textual trafficking is reflected not only in the dissemination of originals in foreign translations, but also, as Goethe's play about Tasso nicely illustrates, in the imaginative engagement with and re-interpretation of world writers in a foreign environment, which provides new vehicles for the meaningful encounter between the source author and his work (the Italian poet in our example), and the projected audience (the German public of Goethe's time). To be sure, such a claim calls for the expansion of the already ambiguous definition of Weltliteratur in order to make room in it for a particular kind of authorial layering that takes even more liberties with an original than a self-acknowledged translation would ever allow itself to do. But it could prove to be especially beneficial for the literary scholar interested in the questions of how individual world literature texts infiltrate and are made use of in a particular society through the efforts of established native writers, and how the resulting artistic (re)constructions can turn into examples of Weltliteratur themselves. This essay tracks just that kind of innovative use of an established French classic author, Molière, and his texts by the famous in his own right Soviet novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, in order to contribute to our understanding of how the creative...