The name of Russia’s greatest writer is Tolstoevsky—or so goes an old, and still popular, academic joke. The joke does, however, have a point. It satirizes a certain vague idea about Russian literature that is shared by many American readers: the idea that Russian literature is a confusing and exotic, if not entirely alien phenomenon, a tantalizing exposure to the “mysterious Russian soul,” perpetually centered on what used to be known as “the ultimate problems of human existence”—those problems, at any rate, that are beyond the reach of our everyday cares and concerns. This stereotypical perception allows for little difference between the individual authors, be they Ivan Turgenev or Boris Pasternak, and accounts for a telling comment made by one of my acquaintances: “Why don’t all these guys [he meant typical characters from a Russian novel] just start looking for a job?”
As for the joke about “Tolstoevsky,” it certainly would have offended the author of The Brothers Karamazov. While it is true that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy were both impassioned idealists engaged in a religious quest, they privately distrusted and disliked each other. Dostoevsky, for example, once called Tolstoy “a sugary talent” and complained that his characters “are uninteresting to the point of strangeness.”
As for the joke about “Tolstoevsky,” it certainly would have offended the author of The Brothers Karamazov.
At the same time, a jocular amalgamation of the two authors into one “Tolstoevsky” points to an additional problem, less philosophical, perhaps, but no less perplexing—and this time not the reader’s fault. It concerns the endemic inferiority of the extant English translations from the Russian, most of which do little justice to the verbal beauty of the originals. Too often great Russian prose, past or present, has been “Englished” in conformity with some prevailing literary fashion, which naturally results in language lacking the personal inspiration and stylistic imprint of the original. Not surprisingly, the result is a “Tolstoevsky,” a more or less characterless composite. Ironically, this approach to translation has on occasion improved upon Tolstoy, a writer who professed (and practiced) a lack of interest in formal refinement. But when applied to Dostoevsky, this procedure has had a disastrous effect, often aggravated by the translator’s inability to appreciate or convey the multiple semantic and syntactical nuances that make the language of Dostoevsky’s novels so superbly individual.
The introduction to the new translation of The Brothers Karamazov promises to remedy this fault.1 At almost eight hundred pages, the translation was a risky and noble venture on the part of a small publishing house, North Point Press—and one cannot help being saddened by the news that North Point will no longer be publishing new books. The husband-and-wife team who translated The Brothers Karamazov anew seems well suited for the task. Richard Pevear is a poet of repute who has also translated both poetry and prose from several tongues; Larissa Volokhonsky is a Russian émigrée, a professional translator, and a student of theology (a clear advantage when approaching Dostoevsky). The pair has chosen to adopt an elevated view of their craft, following in this a practice still common in Russia, where translation is considered an art requiring born talent and professionalism. The difficulties they faced were formidable indeed. Here it may suffice to indicate only a few.
The Russian literary language was created early in the nineteenth century largely through the efforts and genius of Alexander Pushkin, who enjoys in the eyes of Russians a status comparable to that which Shakespeare or Goethe enjoys here. This language was developed by the great stylists of the later nineteenth century, notably Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov, and in this century by those who (like Ivan Bunin or Mikhail Bulgakov) realized their stylistic aims by further refining the idiom approved by literary tradition. Insofar as their work reproduces this “classical” idiom they can be rendered accurately into standard literary English.
This must be sharply contrasted with Dostoevsky’s writing. Drawing on the example of Nikolai Gogol, Dostoevsky fashioned a literary technique with a whole new set of priorities. Instead of working with the established idiom, writers in this tradition—among them such prominent modern writers as Evgeny Zamyatin and Andrei Platonov or, for that matter, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—proceeded to explore and exploit unconventional layers of the vernacular: dialect, jargon, slang, cant, and the like.
Already in his very first publication, the short novel Poor Folk, Dostoevsky surprised “readers with a skillful imitation of semi-educated speech, and in his later work he revealed an unsurpassed mastery over his medium, employing an incredible variety of stylistic means. It remains uncertain whether Dostoevsky actually possessed—as did some of his followers—a conscious and articulate program regarding language and style. But his notebooks leave no doubt that he paid exceptional attention to vocabulary, registering characteristic or unusual words, playing them out, placing them in different contexts, plagiarizing, with equal relish, from a priest or a policeman or a streetwalker.
In any event, it seems likely that Dostoevsky owes much of his verbal virtuosity to intuition rather than deliberate strategy.
In any event, it seems likely that Dostoevsky owes much of his verbal virtuosity to intuition rather than deliberate strategy. In every case, his word choice, however bizarre it first appears, makes the most accurate and meaningful response to the momentary situation created by the plot or a character’s immediate experience. A striking replacement of an anticipated commonplace is fraught with subtle implications, often recognized by the reader only in retrospect. Much of Dostoevsky’s magic spell lies in the unpredictability of his narrative, extending from philosophical or psychological argument to matters of syntax and even grammar. The result is that the idiosyncrasies of content and style for which he was berated in his own time are things for which he is admired by posterity. In fact, reading Dostoevsky in the original, one has to fight the impression that he writes in a language that no one speaks and, very possibly, no one ever spoke. His idiom is principally derived from the vocabulary of the period’s petty urban officials, the milieu Dostoevsky knew best. When this peculiar idiom is applied to grand, metaphysical questions, it is transformed and suddenly acquires a higher significance. The effect is uncanny, verging on the irrational and the fantastic. This accounts in part for the peculiar ambiance, so easily lost in translation, of the Dostoevskian world, where characters, though graphically shaped, appear, as if “through a glass darkly,” both smaller and larger than life.
Several pivotal chapters in The Brothers Karamazov exhibit a complex and careful interplay of stylistic elements alien to common speech. Pevear and Volokhonsky’s response to the challenge of these complexities makes palpable both the felicities and the failures of their new translation. Dostoevsky articulated some of his deepest spiritual commitments in those portions of the novel devoted to the elder Zosima, who was meant to portray the ideal Christian. Dostoevsky’s success with Zosima—so far as generations of Russian readers are concerned, at least—owes much to his judicious use of the archaisms and poeticisms provided by the residue of Church Slavonic that continues to function, even for present-day literature, as a source of occasional verbal enrichment. The very tenor of Zosima’s speech, his collected sayings, his “hagiography” composed by Alyosha Karamazov, are highly stylized and permeated with Slavonicisms. The difficulty of rendering all this into English is exceedingly formidable. One promising device that has not been sufficiently exploited by translators —possibly out of the fear of sounding contrived—is adopting a pattern of allusion to the King James version of the Bible. This might sometimes create an effect comparable to that of Church Slavonic.
While the new translation often fails to capture such stylistic nuances, it. is a definite improvement upon its predecessors. For example, when Pevear and Volokhonsky have the dying Father Zosima say, “I shall not die before I have once more drunk deeply of conversation with you, beloved of my heart,” they are right to do so, even if it sounds somewhat risqué. The elder means exactly what he says: The imagery of spiritual “drink,” common in religious tracts, is here crucial and cannot be glossed over by a mere “delight,” as in the Garnett-Matlaw translation, or by “enjoying,” as in Andrew H. McAndrew’s, nor can it be replaced by “tasting to the full the joy” as in David Magarshack’s. Pevear and Volokhonsky render the rest of the pronouncement as follows: . . before I have looked upon your dear faces and poured out my soul to you once more.” The original employs an idiom of great verbal resonance, but one that defies any precise translation. The key word, liki (for which English has no equivalent), here translated as “faces,” differs from the conventional litsa by emphasizing the ideal, God-like aspect of the human appearance—imago Dei—as it is represented, for instance, on the Orthodox icon. Nor is it possible for a translator to reproduce the inverse word order that makes Father Zosima’s speech captivatingly rhythmic and endows it with an added air of sanctity.
Ivan Karamazov’s prose poem, “The Grand Inquisitor,” is arguably the most famous passage in all of Dostoevsky.
Ivan Karamazov’s prose poem, “The Grand Inquisitor,” is arguably the most famous passage in all of Dostoevsky. The stylistic fabric of the legend is very intricate and is fraught with multiple ironies: the Inquisitor’s irony aimed at Christ, Ivan’s aimed both at Christ and at the Inquisitor, Dostoevsky’s own aimed both at the Inquisitor and at Ivan. On the verbal level, Dostoevsky achieves this ironic polyphony through a skillful use of rhetoric, fusing, for example, the vulgar with the sublime in ways that only appear casual. The new translation is again superior to previous efforts in rendering these rhetorical effects, but it, too, suffers from a familiar host of problems Though accurate, it sometimes lacks force; though inventive, it occasionally pains the ear with an unintended platitude. (Dostoevsky is often vulgar, but never trivial: his platitudes are all intentional.) For the most part, however, it works and even manages to convey something of the melody of this peculiar prose that borders on blank verse. For example, when the Inquisitor expatiates on miracle, mystery, and authority, and on mankind’s need to adore, Pevear and Volokhonsky have him say:
“There is no more ceaseless or tormenting care for man, as long as he remains free, than to find someone to bow down to as soon as possible. But man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it. For the care of these pitiful creatures is not just to find something before which I or some other man can bow down, but to find something that everyone else will also believe in and bow down to, for it must needs be all together. And this need for communality of worship is the chief torment of each man individually, and of mankind asa whole, from the beginning of the ages.”
The key word in this passage had uniformly been rendered as “worship” by the earlier translators. The new choice of “bow down” is happier, not only as a calque, but also because it captures the implication that human nature stands permanently in need of humiliation, a striking undercurrent in the Inquisitor’s political thought. The Russian text, however, continues to use the same word or root right to the end of the speech, with the effect of accumulated sarcasm, while the translation switches back to the more conventional “worship,” presumably to avoid awkwardness.
The ideological symphony of the novel finds its climax in the episode of Ivan Karamazov’s encounter with the devil. This is Dostoevsky’s tour de force, which prefigures in its melding of delusion and reality the art of James, Joyce, and Nabokov. Although it remains uncertain whether Ivan has experienced a supernatural event and has been visited by the unbidden guest from beyond, or whether he has merely fallen victim to hallucination, his interlocutor appears endowed with his own distinctive voice. His speech is a masterly satire of secularist argument, reflecting on, echoing, and parodying the opinions of Ivan himself and of Smerdyakov, his unsavory double. At the very peak of his harangue, the devil revels in pathetic profanation of the sublime, infusing it with sentimentality:
“I was there when the Word who died on the cross was ascending into heaven, carrying on his bosom the soul of the thief who was crucified to the right of him, I heard the joyful shrieks of the cherubim singing and shouting ‘Hosannah,’ and the thundering shout of rapture from the seraphim, which made heaven and all creation shake. And, I swear by all that’s holy, I wanted to join the chorus and shout ‘Hosannah’ with everyone else. It was right on my lips, it was already bursting from my breast . . . you know, I’m very sensitive and artistically susceptible. But common sense—oh, it’s the most unfortunate quality of my nature—kept me within due bounds even then, and I missed the moment!”
This is a competent rendering, though one regrets that the translators followed their predecessors in making the cherubim “shriek” and the seraphim “shout.” The Russian original is much stronger, suggesting a devilish dissonance mocking the highest point of human history: perhaps “squeal” and “howl” would have better suggested this.
The new translation fares better in its treatment of mundane affairs. It is best dealing with scenes of scandal—which were, incidentally, Dostoevsky’s own forte. Scandal in his world is intimately linked to confession, to moments that reveal one’s true nature. Here is Fyodor Pavlovich playing the clown before the elder Zosima:
“Precisely, precisely, it feels good to be offended. You put it so well, I’ve never heard it before. Precisely, precisely, all my life I’ve been getting offended for the pleasure of it, for the aesthetics of it, because it’s not only a pleasure, sometimes it’s beautiful to be offended—you forgot that, great elder: beautiful! I’ll make a note of that! And I’ve lied, I’ve lied decidedly all my life, every day and every hour. Verily, I am a lie and the father of a lie! Or maybe not the father of a lie, I always get my texts mixed up; let’s say the son of a lie, that will do just as well!”
Here is Grushenka showing off before her rival in love, Katerina:
“Now you see, worthy young lady, how wicked and willful I am next to you. Whatever I want, I will do. Maybe I just promised you something, but now I am thinking: what if I like him again, all of a sudden—Mitya, I mean—because I did like him once very much, I liked him for almost a whole hour. So, maybe I’ll go now and tell him to stay with me starting to-day . . . That’s how fickle I am.”
And here is Mitya giving fright to Alyosha:
“You know me by now: a scoundrel, an avowed scoundrel! But know that whatever I have done before or now or may do later—nothing, nothing can compare in baseness with the dishonor I am carrying, precisely now, precisely at this moment, here on my chest, here, right here, which is being enacted and carried out, and which is fully in my power to stop, I can stop it or carry it out, make a note of that! And know, then, that I will carry it out and will not stop it.”
All three are exhibitionists, and each indulges—or pretends to indulge—in soul searching. But it is their individual diction, to some degree captured by this translation, that makes the reader appreciate in full measure the father’s blasphemous self-abasement, the son’s exuberant self-torment, and the ruthless self-infatuation of the woman whom they share.
In pointing out the failings and flaws of this new translation, I do not mean to suggest that the translators have done a poor job. Pevear and Volokhonsky definitely improve on previous efforts, and the sheer volume of work makes their achievement nearly heroic. To their credit, they have escaped the temptation to modernize Dostoevsky’s language and to embroider it with current slang. They claim that his prose should not be revised, corrected, or smoothed over since “a truer rendering of Dostoevsky’s style would restore missing dimensions to the book,” and they often hold to their word: their accomplishment confirms the validity of their methods. Nevertheless, on too many occasions, a native speaker of Russian will feel that their choice of a word or phrase could have been bolder or that there was room for further verbal or syntactical irregularity without compromising the fabric of English.
The impossibility of a perfect translation raises yet another issue and gives support to an unfashionable position.
Still, if this new translation of The Brothers Karamazov leaves a Russian speaker with a sense of frustration, it is not because the translators lacked talent or diligence. It arises rather from the impossibility of the task. The structures of English and Russian are little compatible, and the eccentricity of Dostoevsky’s idiom makes the gap between them all but unbridgeable. The many merits of the new translation notwithstanding, the novel’s innumerable literary gems are bound to remain unfathomable and unsuspected by the reader who is innocent of Russian. English simply cannot plausibly duplicate Dostoevsky’s favorite devices, his inverted word order, his abuse of diminutives, his interplay of Latinisms and vulgarisms that often serve to indicate double-think or to insinuate a touch of hysteria on the part of the characters or the narrator. This is the reason that the new—and, for that matter, any other—translation necessarily falls short of what we would wish. There is no way around it: One must master Russian to enjoy the novel in full. Failing that, Dostoevsky enthusiasts may be advised to make use of Victor Terras’s admirable A Karamazov Companion (1981), which describes and elucidates most of the ambiguities and stylistic quirks of the original.
The impossibility of a perfect translation raises yet another issue and gives support to an unfashionable position. For the fact that all translations are in some sense “failures” suggests that, in the end, style in a work of literature is subordinate to the message. No amount of skill can produce a translation (into any tongue) that does full justice to Dostoevsky’s innovative and idiosyncratic rhetoric; no amount of skill can furnish a foreign reader with the literary experience a native enjoys. Dostoevsky’s message, however, has been transmitted across languages, nations, and races around the world and has profoundly influenced our century’s cultural and psychological landscape. By excessive concentration on the aspects of form, lesser talent often undercuts both the appeal and the availability of his work. But a work of true genius transcends every formal limitation, even that of language, and arrives at the universal.
- The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated from the Russian and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; North Point Press, 796 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.