"Penguin Island" (1908) is a satirical novel. Under the guise of a fantastic story of penguins, baptized by mistake by a dim-sighted saint, and then turned into people, France unfolds a satirical picture of the past and present of France. But the meaning of the novel is broader and deeper than a parody of French national history. Presented in a generalized and allegorical form, the history of the French people here symbolizes the history of all mankind. The literary device employed by France gives him the opportunity to be independent of actual historical facts and, using them only for typical generalizations, to freely conjecture and fantasize so as to reveal the very essence of the historical process.

A full-fledged translation of prose texts of any type is always and invariably a system of transformations of the original. By transformations, we mean the transmission of thought contained in a certain speech unit of the original (a sentence is now taken as such a unit in prose), and the stylistic coloring of this speech unit by other lexico-phraseological and grammatical means than those used in the original.