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Abstract: This study focuses on problems of literary translation and of national literary canon transformation in a target culture, and, as a result, the fate of the original text in the receiving culture. The authors refer to a number of methods, namely, comparative literary studies methods, and contrastive analysis in national translation history and in cross-cultural communication. They attempt to combine translation studies with literary theory and history. Case studies of classical Russian literature (A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, M. Yu. Lermontov, etc.) in translation, its reception and evaluation in the West, as well as the British (J. Austen, J. K. Jerome, O. Wilde, etc.) and American (M. Mitchell, etc.) literature in Russian, are studied and explored. A comparison of the Russian national literary canon and its components (literary texts) in the original with the same elements in translation reveals a number of displacement regularities, namely, priority acquisition, i. e. the transfer of the writer of the translated text into the category of primary authors of the language inexistent in the original culture; priority loss characterized by the author of the original losing their status and transferring to the periphery, and time shift, caused by a belated/untimely translation. These regularities are studied in detail and supported by a number of examples. The authors believe that the regularities under investigation can make a useful contribution not only to the theory of literary translation and translation comparative studies, but also to the history of particular national literatures and to literary-cultural contacts theory. The same regularities are clearly observed in comparison of the British and the American books of fiction in Russian translation, their displacement in the target environment and the target cultural evaluation.