The Idiot

Today sees the publication by Penguin Classics of my new translation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (the Penguin USA editions of Penguin Classics generally follow a little later). So far Penguin have only sent me one copy* - there's apparently some trouble at the new warehouse - but I think it looks ok. And I really like the introduction William Mills Todd III has written for the volume: it takes the reader straight into Dostoyevsky's world, and into the world of this novel. (* update at 11pm - more have now arrived!)

This project has taken me some six years to complete, and it represents a clarification of what for me is the bedrock of the novel: Dostoyevsky's deep ambivalence towards Europe, characterized by the clash between his intense absorption in European - especially French - history and culture, and his adherence to an essentially non-European, Eastern Orthodox religious and existential vision that later found expression in the writings of the Russian philosophers Solovyov and Berdyayev.

I thought I'd reproduce here my translator's note, which is included in the new edition.


A Note on the Translation

Dostoyevsky is often characterized as a writer of Russian nationalist tendencies, his world view seen as an assertion of Russian Orthodox and Russian national ideas. Yet his books are thoroughly steeped in the writing of other nations and cultures, especially Western ones. Like that of Pushkin, of Turgenev and Tolstoy, his Russian-ness is defined against the background of his wide and varied reading of West European literature. The works of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and Schiller are the starting-points of his aesthetic – these sources meet and coincide with the work of his Russian antecedents, particularly Gogol, to produce an oeuvre that is at once a universal human tragicomedy and a cultural-historical debate between East and West. In translating Dostoyevsky’s works into English, one is constantly aware of this tension and interaction between literary cultures. In Crime and Punishment it is echoes of the Anglo-Saxon tradition that predominate: Dickens, but above all Hawthorne, with his themes of sin, punishment and atonement, and Poe, with his invention of the detective story and his researches into the human psyche (in 1861 Dostoyevsky published his own critical comparison of the stories of Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann). Victor Hugo is present, but more as a topical reference than a literary model. In The Brothers Karamazov there are echoes of all of these, but with the addition of Shakespeare and the Germanic influence of Schiller.

The Idiot differs from many of Dostoyevsky’s other works in showing influences and a psychological ambience that are predominantly French: the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georges Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan and Gustave Flaubert is vital to a deeper understanding of the novel’s characterization and intention. References to works by some of these authors actually figure directly in the plot: Dumas’s The Lady With Camellias (in the petit jeu, or game of ‘forfeits’, at Nastasya Filippovna’s birthday soirée), Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (in the scene where Myshkin and Rogozhin sit beside the corpse of Nastasya Filippovna), and Hugo’s The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death (in Myshkin’s description of the execution he watched in France). In addition, the structure of the novel, and its setting in an environment that is very different from that of its predecessor, Crime and Punishment – the high society salons and houses of St Petersburg – shows affinities with the structure and setting of novels by Georges Sand, whose work Dostoyevsky had read and admired.

It may, therefore, be plain that the challenges posed to the English translator by a novel like The Idiot are of a different nature from those present in other works of Dostoyevsky’s, in particular the novel Crime and Punishment, with its, to some extent, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ literary background and precedents. For one thing, the ‘Frenchness’ of The Idiot is difficult to render in English. In the dialogue, Dostoyevsky often has a habit of inserting Russified French words into the text: peti-zhyo (petit jeu), prues (prouesse), afishevanye (from Fr. afficher),frappirovan (from Fr. frapper), konsekventnyi (from Fr. conséquent) and so on, and this effect is heightened by a peppering of phrases that either mimic French constructions or are directly written in French. For another, the characters speak in formal styles, which are sometimes, as in the case of the Yepanchin family, those of the French-educated upper middle class, but are also – as in the case of Lebedev and Rogozhin – urban idioms that have ceased to exist in contemporary Russian and cannot be easily transposed into another language. Lebedev speaks a Russian that lies somewhere between the lingo of nineteenth century petty civil servants and the rhetoric of religious sects such as the Old Believers. Rogozhin’s speech is derived from, among other things, that of nineteenth century Russian merchants. To attempt to put it into English as ‘Cockney’ or Dickensian substandard English is to miss its essence, for it, too, is a formal style of speech, with its own special – and sometimes even ‘specialist’ – vocabulary, grammar and syntax.

A further challenge to the task of translation is represented by the presence in the novel of a fictional narrator, a device that is also a feature of other novels of Dostoyevsky, in particular The Brothers Karamazov. In The Idiot, the narrator, when present, writes in a style which the author deliberately intends to be clumsy, and even comical at times – laborious, pedantic and unconsciously self-contradictory, the chronicles of an untalented local newspaper journalist in charge of the society columns of his publication. This fictional narrator moves in and out of the novel – it is not always absolutely clear where his contributions begin and end, or exactly where Dostoyevsky takes over. This tongue-in-cheek element of burlesque in the writing is hard to catch in translation, but I have attempted it, and the reader must judge the degree of my success.

Amidst the polyphonic richness of the text, I have mostly opted for maximum comprehensibility, while remaining as close to the original Russian as possible. The reader should not forget, however, that to Russians Dostoyevsky’s prose can seem strange and even perverse at times, while none the less possessing an almost magical quality. It is, I believe, the translator’s task to preserve the nervous, electric flow of the writing, while still preserving the idiosyncrasies of the author’s style – from the repetition of words like ‘even’ and ‘again’, which crop up with disconcerting frequency in many of the sentences, to the more extended repetitions which are also Dostoyevsky’s hallmarks. Also, the sheer oddity of some of the dialogue cannot really be disguised without betraying the author’s aesthetic purpose, which is to create a world that superficially resembles the ‘real’ world, but is much more akin to the landscape of a dream.

Where Russian names are concerned, I have kept the forms that appear in the original Russian text, in most cases giving name and patronymic where Dostoyevsky does this: Lev Nikolayevich, Ivan Fyodorovich, Nina Alexandrovna, Afanasy Ivanovich, Darya Alexeyevna, etc. I have also preserved the contractions of the patronymic – Pavlych for Pavlovich, Ivanych for Ivanovich, etc. – which are commonly used by Russians in colloquial speech. The diminutive forms of names have also been kept where they are used in the original – Ganka (Ganya), Varya (Varvara), Kolya (Nikolai), etc., as these denote affection, and are important psychological elements in the narrative.

The text used for this translation is that contained in F.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Complete collection of works in 30 volumes), Leningrad, Nauka, 1972-90, vol.8.