David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

11… especially in the Victorianish translations of Ms. Constance Garnett, who in the 1930s and ’40s cornered the Dostoevsky & Tolstoy — translation market, and whose 1935 rendering of The Idiot has stuff like (scanning almost at random):“Nastasya Filippovna!” General Epanchin articulated reproachfully.…“I am very glad I’ve met you here, Kolya,” said Myshkin to him. “Can’t you help me? I must be at Nastasya Filippovna’s. I asked Ardelion Alexandrovitch to take me there, but you see he is asleep. Will you take me there, for I don’t know the streets, nor the way?”…The phrase flattered and touched and greatly pleased General Ivolgin: he suddenly melted, instantly changed his tone, and went off into a long, enthusiastic explanation.…

And even in the acclaimed new Knopf translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the prose (in, e.g., Crime and Punishment ) is still often odd and starchy:“Enough!” he said resolutely and solemnly. “Away with mirages, away with false fears, away with spectres!.. There is life! Was I not alive just now? My life hasn’t died with the old crone! May the Lord remember her in His kingdom and — enough, my dear, it’s time to go! Now is the kingdom of reason and light and… and will and strength… and now we shall see! Now we shall cross swords!” he added presumptuously, as if addressing some dark force and challenging it.

Umm, why not just “as if challenging some dark force”? Can you challenge a dark force without addressing it? Or is there in the original Russian something that keeps the above phrase from being redundant, stilted, just plain bad in the same way a sentence like “‘Come on!’ she said, addressing her companion and inviting her to accompany her” is bad? If so, why not acknowledge that in English it’s still bad and just go ahead and fix it? Are literary translators not supposed to mess with the original syntax at all? But Russian is an inflected language — it uses cases and declensions instead of word order — so translators are already messing with the syntax when they put Dostoevsky’s sentences into uninflected English. It’s hard to understand why these translations have to be so clunky. (back to text)

12 What on earth does it mean to “fly at” somebody? It happens dozens of times in every FMD novel. What, “fly at” them in order to beat them up? To yell at them? Why not say that, if you’re translating? (back to text)

13 Q.v. a random example from Pevear and Volkhonsky’s acclaimed new Knopf rendering of Notes from Underground: “Mr. Ferfichkin, tomorrow you will give me satisfaction for your present words!” I said loudly, pompously addressing Ferfichkin.

“You mean a duel, sir? At your pleasure,” the man answered. (back to text)

14 (… who was, like Faulkner’s Caddie, “doomed and knew it,” and whose heroism consists in her haughty defiance of a doom she also courts. FMD seems like the first fiction writer to understand how deeply some people love their own suffering, how they use it and depend on it. Nietzsche would take Dostoevsky’s insight and make it a cornerstone of his own devastating attack on Christianity, and this is ironic: in our own culture of “enlightened atheism” we are very much Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs, and without Dostoevsky there would have been no Nietzsche, and yet Dostoevsky is among the most profoundly religious of all writers.) (back to text)

15 Frank doesn’t sugar-coat any of this stuff, but from his bio we learn that Dostoevsky’s character was really more contradictory than prickish. Insufferably vain about his literary reputation, he was also tormented his whole life by what he saw as his artistic inadequacies; a leech and a spendthrift, he also voluntarily assumed financial responsibility for his stepson, for the nasty and ungrateful family of his deceased brother, and for the debts of Epoch, the famous literary journal that he and his brother had co-edited. Frank’s new Volume IV makes it clear that it was these honorable debts, rather than general deadbeatism, that sent Mr. and Mrs. FMD into exile in Europe to avoid debtors’ prison, and that it was only at the spas of Europe that Dostoevsky’s gambling mania went out of control. (back to text)

16 Sometimes this allergy is awkwardly striking, as in e.g. the start of part 2 of The Idiot, when Prince Myshkin (the protagonist) has left St. Petersburg for six full months in Moscow: “of Myshkin’s adventures during his absence from Petersburg we can give little information,” even though the narrator has access to all sorts of other events outside St. P. Frank doesn’t say much about FMD’s Muscophobia; it’s hard to figure what exactly it’s about. (back to text)

17 = Poor Folk, a standard-issue “social novel” that frames a (rather goopy) love story with depictions of urban poverty sufficiently ghastly to elicit the approval of the socialist Left. (back to text)

18 It is true that FMD’s epilepsy — including the mystical illuminations that attended some of his preseizure auras — gets comparatively little discussion in Frank’s bio; and reviewers like the London Times’ s James L. Rice (himself the author of a book on Dostoevsky and epilepsy) have complained that Frank “gives no idea of the malady’s chronic impact” on Dostoevsky’s religious ideals and their representation in his novels. The question of proportion cuts both ways, though: q.v. the New York Times Book Review’ s Jan Parker, who spends at least a third of his review of Frank’s Volume III making claims like “It seems to me that Dostoevsky’s behavior does conform fully to the diagnostic criteria for pathological gambling as set forth in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual.” As much as anything, reviews like these help us appreciate Joseph Frank’s own evenhanded breadth and lack of specific axes to grind. (back to text)

19 Let’s not neglect to observe that Frank’s Volume IV provides some good personal dirt. W/r/t Dostoevsky’s hatred of Europe, for example, we learn that his famous 1867 spat with Turgenev, which was ostensibly about Turgenev’s having offended Dostoevsky’s passionate nationalism by attacking Russia in print and then moving to Germany, was also fueled by the fact that FMD had previously borrowed fifty thalers from Turgenev and promised to pay him back right away and then never did. Frank is too restrained to make the obvious point: it’s much easier to live with stiffing somebody if you can work up a grievance against him. (back to text)

20 Another bonus: Frank’s volumes are replete with marvelous and/or funny tongue-rolling names — Snitkin, Dubolyobov, Strakhov, Golubov, von Voght, Katkov, Nekrasov, Pisarev. One can see why Russian writers like Gogol and FMD made a fine art of epithetic names. (back to text)

21 Random example from her journal: “‘Poor Feodor, he does suffer so much, and is always so irritable, and liable to fly out about trifles.… It’s of no consequence, because the other days are good, when he is so sweet and gentle. Besides, I can see that when he screams at me it is from illness, not from bad temper.’” Frank quotes and comments on long passages of this kind of stuff, but he shows little awareness that the Dostoevskys’ marriage was in certain ways quite sick, at least by 1990s standards — see e.g. “Anna’s forbearance, whatever prodigies of self-command it may have cost her, was amply compensated for (at least in her eyes) by Dostoevsky’s immense gratitude and growing sense of attachment.” (back to text)

22 Q.v. also, for instance, Dostoevsky’s disastrous passion for the bitch-goddess Appolinari Suslova, or the mental torsions he performed to justify his casino binges… or the fact, amply documented by Frank, that FMD really was an active part of the Petrashevsky Circle and as a matter of fact probably did deserve to be arrested under the laws of the time, this pace a lot of other biographers who’ve tried to claim that Dostoevsky just happened to be dragged by friends to the wrong radical meeting at the wrong time. (back to text)