The Idiot (6 page)

Fanger, Donald,
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol
(Harvard University Press 1965).

Frank, Joseph,
Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849
(Princeton University Press, 1979).

— ,
Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859
(Princeton University Press, 1983).

— ,
Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865
(Princeton University Press, 1986).

— ,
Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
(Princeton University Press, 1995).

— ,
Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881
(Princeton University Press, 2002).

Freud, Sigmund, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’, in René Wellek (ed.),
Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 98-111.

Gide, André,
Dostoevsky
(Seeker & Warburg, 1949).

Holquist, Michael,
Dostoevsky and the Novel
(Princeton University Press, 1977).

Jackson, Robert Louis,
Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of his Philosophy of Art,
2nd edn (Physsardt Publishers, 1978).

Jones, Malcolm V.,
Dostoyevsky: The Novel of Discord
(Barnes and Noble Books, 1976).

Kjetsaa, Geir,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life
(Viking, 1987). A good general and comprehensive overview of Dostoyevsky’s life and work for the non-specialist reader.

Knapp, Liza,
The Annihilation ofInertia:
Dostoevsky
and Metaphysics
(Northwestern University Press, 1966).

— (ed.),
Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot: A
Critical Companion
(Northwestern University Press, 1998).

Lary, N. M.,
Dostoevsky and Dickens: A Study of Literary
Influence (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

Martinsen, Deborah A., Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s
Liars and Narrative Exposure
(Ohio State University Press, 2003).

Miller, Robin Feuer,
Dostoevsky and
The Idiot:
Author, Narrator, and Reader
(Harvard University Press, 1981).

Mochulsky, K.,
Dostoevsky: His Life and Work,
trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton University Press, 1967).

Muchnic, Helen,
Dostoevsky’s English Reputation, 1881-1936
(Octagon Books, 1969). Dostoyevsky seen through the eyes of English writers and novelists, and a study of his effect on the development of English literature.

Murav, Harriet,
Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique
(Stanford University Press, 1992).

Peace, Richard Arthur,
Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels
(Cambridge University Press, 1971).

Rice, James L.,
Dostoevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and Medical History
(Ardis, 1985).

Terras, Victor, The Idiot:
An Interpretation
(Twayne Publishers, 1990).

Tsypkin, Leonid,
Summer in Baden-Baden: A Novel,
trans. Roger and Angela Keys (New Directions, 2001).

Wasiolek, Edward,
Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction
(MIT Press, 19
⁶
4).

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 œuvre 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 soiree), 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 - show 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, 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:
petizhyo (petit jeu), prues (prouesse), afishevanye
(from Fr.
afficher), frappiro
van
(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 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, Iv
an 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 ν tridsati tomakh
(Complete collection of works in thirty volumes), Leningrad, Nauka, 1972-90, vol. 8.

David McDuff

At about nine o’clock one morning, at the end of November, during a thaw, a train of the St Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching St Petersburg at full steam. Such were the damp and the fog that it was a while before daylight broke; at ten yards to the right and the left of the track it was hard to make out anything at all from the windows of the carriage. The passengers included some returning from abroad; but the third-class compartments were the most crowded, with ordinary folk and those on business, who had not travelled far. Everyone, as is usually the case, was tired, with eyes heavy after the night, everyone was cold, every face was pale yellow, the colour of the fog.

In one of the third-class carriages, since dawn, two passengers had found themselves opposite each other close by the window - both young men, both with almost no luggage to speak of, both unostentatiously dressed, both with rather remarkable facial features, and both wishing to enter into conversation with the other. If each had known what was especially remarkable about each other at that moment, they would certainly have marvelled that chance had so strangely put them opposite each other in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw-St Petersburg train. One of them was rather short, about twenty-seven, with almost black curly hair, and small, grey, but fiery eyes. His nose was broad and flat, and he had high cheek-bones; his thin lips were constantly creased in a kind of brazen, mocking and even cruel smile; but his brow was high and well formed and did much to compensate for the ignobly developed lower part of his face. Especially striking in that face was its deathly pallor, which gave the whole of the young man’s physiognomy an emaciated look, in spite of his rather sturdy build, at the same time imparting to it something passionate, to the point of suffering, that was out of harmony with his coarse and insolent smile and his harsh, self-satisfied gaze. He was warmly dressed, in a wide, black wool-lined sheepskin overcoat, and had not felt the cold overnight, whereas his neighbour had been compelled to endure on his shivering back all the delights of a damp November Russian night, for which he was obviously not prepared. He wore a rather capacious, thick sleeveless cloak with an enormous hood, of the kind often used in winter, in such far-off places such as Switzerland or northern Italy, by travellers who do not, of course, have to reckon with the distance between points so far removed as Eidkuhnen
¹
and St Petersburg. But what had been suitable and thoroughly satisfactory in Italy turned out to be not wholly so in Russia. The wearer of the cloak with the hood was a young man, also about twenty-six or twenty-seven, of slightly above-average height, with very thick, fair hair, sunken cheeks and a light, pointed, almost completely white little beard. His eyes were large, blue and fixed; in their gaze there was something quiet but heav
y, and they were filled with that strange expression by which some can detect epilepsy on first glance at a person. The young man’s face was, however, pleasant, delicate and lean, though colourless, and now so cold that it was positively blue. In his hands dangled a thin bundle made of old, faded silk, apparently containing all his travelling possessions. He wore thick-soled shoes with buttoned gaiters - all quite un-Russian. The dark-haired neighbour in the wool-lined sheepskin coat observed all this, partly because he had nothing else to do, and, at last, with that insensitive smile in which people so unceremoniously and carelessly express their satisfaction at the misfortunes of a neighbour, inquired:

‘Chilly?’

And hunched his shoulders.

‘Yes, indeed,’ the neighbour replied with extreme readiness, ‘and, mind you, there’s still a thaw. What would it be like in a frost? I really didn’t think it could be as cold as this in our country. I’m not used to it.’

‘Come from abroad, have you?’

‘Yes, from Switzerland.’

‘Whew! You don’t say!...’