I first read Dostoevsky when I was at Cambridge doing my PhD. I can’t remember why I decided to begin The Brothers Karamazov. I must have first heard of Dostoevsky when I was about eighteen. I think I saw someone reading Crime and Punishment and asked about it. I came away with the impression that Dostoevsky was rather hard. I have always liked challenges and so I must have stored away the idea that I should read him.
I was studying Søren Kierkegaard. I came to him by chance too. Perhaps I read somewhere that there were similarities between Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. Someone might have mentioned that The Brothers Karamazov contains a good deal that is philosophical and theological.
I read The Brothers Karamazov in the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. It had only just come out. I read the novel like I would read any other novel. I liked it but found it tough going and certainly didn’t understand all of it. The plot could be condensed down to about 200 pages. But stretched to over a thousand pages with long stretches of dialogue, it is possible to lose sight of what is going on.
People sometimes ask which translation they should read. I usually answer that it doesn’t matter much. Each translation has its merits and each has its faults. There are, I think, two ways to translate. Either you set out to produce a text that is as close as possible to the original, or you try to create a text that is the best possible English even if it is not so close to the original.
I much prefer the King James Version of the Bible because it is the best possible English. It is rather archaic now, but then so is Shakespeare and so especially is Chaucer. What does being archaic have to do with the issue anyway? But although I much prefer the language of the King James Bible, I accept that it is not always terribly accurate. Bible scholarship has moved on and we can produce more accurate translations. They are usually rather ugly, however. The difference is between “lead me not into temptation” and “save us from the time of trial.” The one is beautiful and clearly expresses the meaning in general; the latter is more accurate, but ugly. It depends on what you are looking for.
Vladimir Nabokov brilliantly translated Pushkin’s poem “Evgeny Onegin.” It sets out to reproduce as accurately as possible the Russian text. It is not of course completely literal. Russian is very far indeed from English. I always illustrate this in a couple of ways. In Russian there isn’t really a verb “to be” in the present tense. You can’t say “I am Russian,” you just say “I Russian.” There isn’t really a verb “to have” in the sense that we use it. You don’t usually say “I have a car,” rather, you say, “at me is a car.” Russian tends to use passive constructions more than English. You don’t say “I am twenty,” but rather, “to me is twenty years.” You don’t say “I am called John,” but rather, “They call me John.” There is no word for “a” and no word for “the.” Therefore, to attempt to translate Russian completely literally leads to something quite horrible. What this means is that a balance has to be struck. You have no choice but to paraphrase to an extent.
Nabokov’s “Onegin” is as close as you can possibly get to reproducing Pushkin in English. For a student following Pushkin’s Russian text, this translation is invaluable; but it in no way is able to show what is beautiful about Pushkin and why everyone thinks that Pushkin was the greatest Russian writer. The poetry has been lost in the translation. The only way to keep the poetry is to get a writer who is the equal of Pushkin, to use Pushkin’s text as a basis for a new poem. This was done with Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer. In that case the translation may not be especially accurate, but it will at least be great writing.
This is our problem: we read a novel by a great writer called Dostoevsky, but when reading a translation we read not one of his words. All of the words we read are by a translator. But is this translator a great writer? Nabokov was a fine writer, but rarely do translators even approach this level. Usually a translator’s skill is in knowing foreign languages. But this does not make you a good writer, let alone a great one.
With regard to Dostoevsky, I think that Pevear and Volokhonsky are accurate, but the English frequently is poor. As I understand it, Volokhonsky produces a literal translation and her husband then turns it into better English. The result is a text that is very close to Dostoevsky. It is therefore very useful for someone who is following the Russian text and using a translation to help them. The result, however, I find to be stylistically poor. Perhaps it is that Pevear just isn’t a very good writer. I find his introductions to be full of ugly English too. Perhaps this method of translating will always produce a text that is too literal. I have read that Pevear’s Russian is not especially fluent. Who knows if this is true? But it may be that neither member of this husband-and-wife team could produce a reasonable translation on their own. It is perhaps for this reason that while I use it myself precisely, because it is literal, I would not recommend it to someone who didn’t speak Russian.
What does it matter to you really if the translation is literal? You will never read or compare it with the original. Better by far to pick the translation with the best style. Dostoevsky is difficult enough without making the English difficult and convoluted. His style cannot be reproduced anyway.
There are translators who are far better writers than Pevear. I would recommend David McDuff in Penguin and Ignat Avsey in Oxford World Classics. I will continue to use Pevear; but only because I can read Russian.
Ideally, of course you should learn Russian. But this is hardly realistic for everyone. There are always going to be novels in languages which we don’t know. We cannot learn every language. At least I can’t. But in the case of Dostoevsky, what is most interesting is neither his plots nor his style.
I keep returning to Dostoevsky, though I think Tolstoy and Pushkin are better writers. Dostoevsky’s style takes some getting used to. The dialogue is frequently impossibly unrealistic. His grammar is convoluted and you can get lost in long sentences that go on and on. There are times when I find him to be obscure. There are sentences and whole chapters where I’m not that sure what he means. But sometimes this is my fault. On rereading a chapter, on returning to a novel after the gap of some years, I find my understanding has improved. There are ideas in Dostoevsky that are very deep indeed. These are not lost in translation.
I don’t intend to comment much on plot. I will focus almost entirely on The Brothers Karamazov, but I will include a few pieces from other novels. I think The Brothers Karamazov is by far the most interesting of Dostoevsky’s novels in terms of philosophy and theology. Perhaps this is just because this is the novel that I have studied the most. There are no doubt other seams that can be mined in The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and Demons. Perhaps I will go on to mine them, but as yet, most of the ideas that I find interesting are in The Brothers Karamazov.
These ideas are not everywhere. There are whole chunks of Dostoevsky that are not about philosophy and not about theology. There are whole chunks that are only to do with character and plot. These are of course interesting, but they are not what I am writing about. I am not doing literary criticism. I find the activity of academics who write poorly, criticising writers who write well, to be peculiarly self-defeating and presumptuous. Why would I want to read such people, rather than the texts themselves?
For this reason also, my method of writing is not scholarly. You will not find many footnotes here. This is not how I write. When I was at Cambridge, I took a book by Kierkegaard and wrote about it in great detail. I wrote about the text and only about the text. Later, because this was the game that we had to play, I went to the library and read a whole chunk of secondary sources and put them in footnotes. But I only ever read indexes and only ever used the odd sentence which I could put into the footnote. The purpose was just to play the game. But I find this game to be pointless. You too can search in a library or an online database for books and articles about Dostoevsky. You don’t need my help.
But if you want to read one person’s response to the text, then that is what you will get. Of course, this method may be self-defeating. If I don’t read secondary sources, why should you? Quite right it is better by far that you should read Dostoevsky than read me. But perhaps you are seeking a guide, someone who may have some interesting ideas about a writer that you like. If that is so, then you may find this book interesting.
I will not explain very much about the novels I discuss, their characters, or their plots. I start from the assumption that you have already read the novels. Much of what I write will be perfectly comprehensible, even if you haven’t yet read the novels, but some will not.
I write only about those chapters where I think I have something interesting to say. Large chunks of the novels I pass over in silence. Each chapter will be unconnected with the others and can be read separately in any order, but I can find a way of unifying them, later I will do so. Dixi.
Come back next week for Chapter 1: Women of Faith.