230 Polina’s diary, from The Gambler, p. 219.
231 Polina’s diary, from The Gambler, pp. 219–20.
232 The Gambler, trans. Terras p. 14, trans. Garnett, p. 319.
233 Letter to Strakhov, 18 (30) September 1863.
234 Crime and Punishment, p. 343.
235 Notes from the Underground, p. 468.
236 Notes from the Underground, p. 472.
237 Notes from the Underground, p. 475.
238 Notes from the Underground, passim.
239 Letter to Mikhail, 26 March 1864.
240 The Idiot, p. 65.
241 Letter to Mikhail, 26 March 1864.
242 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 519.
243 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 506.
244 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 521.
245 Letter to Wrangel, 31 March 1865.
246 Letter to Andrei Dostoevsky, 29 July 1864.
247 Letter to Wrangel, 9 March 1865 (continued 9 April, 14 April).
248 The Idiot, p. 112.
249 Letter to Wrangel, 9 March 1865 (continued 9 April, 14 April).
250 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 530.
251 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 530.
252 Notes from the Underground, p. 515.
253 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 346.
254 We see a tantalising hint of Martha in The Idiot, when Nastasya says to Myshkin, ‘Nobody ever spoke to me like that before. They bought and sold me, but no decent man ever wooed me.’
255 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 403.
256 Frank, p. 450.
257 ‘How Dostoevsky proposed to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya’ by Sofia Kovalevskaya, in Sekirin, pp. 176–7.
258 Letter to Nadezhda Suslova, 19 April 1865.
259 Letter to Wrangel, 9 March 1865 (continued 9 April, 14 April).
260 Letter to Katkov, September 1865.
261 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 547.
262 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 501.
263 The Idiot, p. 410.
264 Notebooks for Crime and Punishment, trans. Edward Wasiolek (1967), p. 64. The metaphor had been on his mind since the drafting of Notes from the Underground – see p. 513, in which the Underground Man punches his driver in the back of the head. He had also recently read a new poem by Nekrasov in The Contemporary, ‘About the Weather’, in which a weak horse is mercilessly beaten by its owner.
265 Letter to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, 17 June 1866.
266 The Adolescent, p. 158.
267 The Adolescent, p. 158.
268 Letter to Polina, 12 (24) August 1865.
269 Letter to Wrangel, 16 (28) September 1865.
270 Letter to Katkov, 25 April 1866.
271 Letter to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, April–May 1866.
272 Letter to Alexander Miliukov, 10–15 July 1866.
273 This insult would be used by fictional children 12 years later to humiliate Captain Snegiryov in The Brothers Karamazov.
274 Crime and Punishment, p. 615.
275 Letter to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, 17 June 1866.
276 Letter to Miliukov, 10–15 July 1866.
277 Miliukov’s recollection, quoted in Grossman, pp. 391ff.
278 Notes from the Underground, p. 540.
279 Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife, ed. and trans. S. S. Koteliansky, p. 9.
280 Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife, pp. 12–13.
281 The Eternal Husband, in Three Short Novels of Dostoevsky, p. 298.
282 Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife, p. 22.
283 Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife, p. 23.
284 Frank, p. 514.
285 Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife, p. 24.
286 Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife, p. 31.
287 Crime and Punishment, trans. Ready, p. 570.
288 Dostoevsky Portrayed by his Wife, pp. 42–4.
289 Crime and Punishment, p. 571.
290 Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, p. 65.
291 Notes from the Underground, p. 463.
292 Letter to Polina, 23 April (5 May) 1867.
293 Letter to Polina, 23 April (5 May) 1867.
294 Letter to Maikov, 16 (28) August 1867.
295 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, p. 69.
296 Letter to Anna, 12 (24) May 1867.
297 Devils, p. 25. It is interesting to see how the Sistine Madonna evolves as a symbol up to the final novel, when Dmitri Karamazov laments: ‘I can’t endure the thought that man starts with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s worse is that the man with Sodom in his soul doesn’t renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence.’ (The Brothers Karamazov, p. 114)
298 Anna became quite fascinated with a young invalid girl who was accompanied everywhere by a handsome young man she seemed to adore, not unlike the characters of Stavrogin and Maria in Devils.
299 Notes from the Underground, p. 522.
300 Letter to Maikov, 16 (28) August 1867.
301 The Adolescent, p. 183.
302 The Adolescent, p. 200.
303 The Idiot, p. 281.
304 The Unpublished Dostoevsky, Volume 2, p. 72.
305 Devils, p. 331.
306 Devils, p. 358.
307 Devils, p. 357.
308 Letter to Maikov, 16 (28) August 1867. Anna recounts a version of the conversation in her diary, pp. 238–9.
309 ‘Memoirs about Turgenev and Dostoevsky’ by E. M. Garshin, quoted in Sekirin, p. 243.
310 Letter to Maikov, 16 (28) August 1867.
311 The Adolescent, p. 182.
312 The Adolescent, p. 7.
313 Devils, pp. 424–5 (from Stavrogin’s unpublished confession).
314 The Diary of Dostoyevsky’s Wife, p. 266.
315 The Diary of Dostoyevsky’s Wife, p. 298.
316 The Idiot, p. 309.
317 Letter to Maikov, 16 (28) August 1867.
318 Letter to Stepan Yanovsky, 21–22 February (4–5 March) 1868.
319 Letter to Maikov, 16 (28) August 1867.
320 Letter to Sofia Ivanova, 29 September (11 October) 1867.
321 Letter to Sofia Ivanova, 29 September (11 October) 1867.
322 Letter to Maikov, 31 December 1867 (12 January 1868).
323 Letter to Maikov, 31 December 1867 (12 January 1868).
324 The Idiot, p. 485.
325 Letter to Maikov, 18 February (1 March) 1868.
326 The Idiot, p. 181.
327 Letter to Maikov, 18 February (1 March) 1868. He reprises the theme in his letter to Maikov on 21–22 March (2–3 April).
328 The Idiot, p. 343.
329 The Idiot, p. 338.
330 The Idiot, p. 339.
331 The Idiot, p. 411.
332 Letter to Pasha, 19 February (2 March) 1868.
333 Devils, p. 611. Shatov is the figure most closely aligned with Dostoevsky in the book.
334 Letter to Stepan Yanovsky, 21–22 February (4–5 March) 1868.
335 Devils, p. 611.
336 Devils, p. 612.
337 Letter to Maikov, 21–22 March (2–3 April) 1868.
338 The Idiot, p. 199.
339 The Idiot, p. 365.
340 Letter to Anna, 23 March (4 April) 1868.
341 Letter to Maikov, 18 (30) May 1868.
342 The Adolescent, p. 62.
343 The Adolescent, p. 62.
344 The Adolescent, p. 62.
345 Letter to Maikov, 18 (30) May 1868.
346 Reminiscences, ed. S. V. Belov and V. A. Tunimanov, p. 148.
347 The Idiot, p. 383.
348 The Idiot, pp. 278–9.
349 It is interesting to compare Pasha’s behaviour, as described in the letter to Katkov, 3 March 1868, with the attitude of Arkady Dolgoruky in the first part of The Adolescent.
350 Letter to Maikov, 18 (30) May 1868.
351 ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, from Notes from the Underground and Other Stories, p. 648.
352 Letter to Maikov, 22 June (4 July) 1868.
353 The Idiot, p. 345.
354 Letter to Maikov, 26 October (7 November) 1868.
355 According to research presented by Valentina Supino at the XVII Symposium of the International Dostoevsky Society (2019).
356 Letter to Strakhov, 14 (26) August 1869.
357 Letter to Strakhov, 26 February (10 March) 1869.
358 Letter to Sofia Ivanovna, 29 August (10 September) 1869.
359 Anna sees in it a fictional mirror of his 1866 holiday in Liublino, with Alexander Lobov an idealised version of Pasha, and Velchaninov sharing some characteristics with Dostoevsky.
360 Letter to Maikov, 12 (24) February 1870.
361 The Idiot, p. 232.
362 Devils, p. 346.
363 Letter to Strakhov, 26 February (10 March) 1869.
364 The Unpublished Dostoevsky, Volume 3, p. 139.
365 Frank, p. 604.
366 Letter to Maikov, 9 (21) October 1870.
367 Letter to Sofia Ivanova, 9 (21) October 1870.
368 Letter to Katkov, 8 (20) October 1870.
369 Letter to Sofia Ivanova, 17 (29) August 1870.
370 Letter to Strakhov, 18 (30) May 1871.
371 The Adolescent, pp. 180–1.
372 Letter to Anna, 16 (28) April 1871.
373 Letter to Maikov, 30 December 1870 (11 January 1871).
374 Grossman (p. 49). The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (p. 200) attributes the quotation to something he wrote in the album of an acquaintance in 1873, which would imply either that he didn’t know his real age, or that he didn’t want to give it. This is corroborated by a letter dated 9 April 1876, when, at 54, he claims to be 53.
375 Letter to Strakhov, 2 (14) December 1870.
376 Devils, p. 567.
377 ‘Bobok’, from A Writer’s Diary, Volume 1, p. 171.
378 ‘Bobok’, from A Writer’s Diary, Volume 1, p. 170.
379 Reminiscences, p. 204.
380 The Adolescent, p. 111.
381 Letter to Strakhov, 23 April (5 May) 1871.
382 ‘Bobok’, in Notes from the Underground and Other Stories, p. 580.
383 ‘The Heavenly Christmas Tree’, in Notes from the Underground and Other Stories, p. 596.
384 Letter to Meshchersky, 12 November 1873. The last sentence was inked out in the original.
385 The Adolescent, p. 351.
386 Frank, p. 673.
387 Letter to Strakhov, 18 (30) May 1871.
388 The Adolescent, p. 364.
389 Reminiscences, p. 229.
390 The Adolescent, p. 94.
391 Letter to Anna, 6 February 1875.
392 Vsevolod Soloviev’s recollection, in Sekirin, pp. 209–10.
393 Letter to Anna, 7 February 1875.
394 Letter to Anna, 10 (22) June 1875.
395 Letter to Anna, 13 (25) June 1875. An intriguing counterfactual would be to consider whether anything might have changed if Tolstoy’s novel had been published in Notes of the Fatherland and Dostoevsky’s in The Russian Herald. Of his five long novels, The Adolescent is the least well known and also the only one that didn’t benefit from the circulation of The Russian Herald and the influence of Katkov as a patron. How much did his reputation suffer from alienating the readership he had been cultivating for the past ten years?
396 A Writer’s Diary, Volume 2, July and August 1877, recalling the spring of 1876.
397 Devils, pp. 124–5.
398 Devils, pp. 124–5. His Writer’s Diary was wildly popular at the time, though he is now more respected as a novelist and philosopher than as a political commentator. One of his more bizarre military ideas was for Russia to build a huge, slow, flat-bottomed ship – a sitting duck, effectively – to send to Europe as a sign that it wanted peace rather than war. Funnily enough, Russia did unintentionally construct a similar warship around this time, known as the Popovka, a slow, circular, flat-bottomed ship that spun off course whenever one of its cannon was fired: Popovki too are essential. (The Unpublished Dostoevsky, Volume 3, p. 79)
399 Letter to Pyotr Bykov, 15 April 1876. I will observe in parenthesis that a true autobiography is almost impossible, and that man is bound to lie about himself (Notes from the Underground, p. 481). At this time, he may have been reluctant: as Arkady says at the opening of The Adolescent, ‘I shall never sit down to write my autobiography even if I live to be a hundred. One must be too disgustingly in love with the self to write without shame about oneself.’ (The Adolescent, p. 3) Nevertheless, he later warmed to the idea.
400 Reminiscences, pp. 262–4.
401 Letter to Anna, 6 (18) August 1876 Many of the bluest passages in the letters are inked out by Anna, but some of Fyodor’s allusions to feet are saved – see also his letter of 16 (28) August 1879: ‘I am dying to kiss every toe on your foot . . . If I weren’t put out by what you say about postal censorship, God only knows what I’d write to you.’ He shares this fixation with the character of Rakitin in The Brothers Karamazov, who writes a poem about Madame Hokhlakov’s ‘captivating little foot’, a pastiche of Pushkin, who wrote about the love of women’s feet in Eugene Onegin.
402 Letter to Anna, 17 July 1877.
403 She is embodied in the character of Stinking Lizaveta in The Brothers Karamazov.
404 A Writer’s Diary, Volume 2, December 1877.
405 Reminiscences, p. 288.
406 A Writer’s Diary, Volume 2, December 1877.
407 Letter to Stephan Yanovsky, 17 December 1877.
408 The Idiot, p. 13.
409 The Idiot, p. 60.
410 The Idiot, p. 212.
411 Letter to Nikolai Dostoevsky, 16 May 1878.
412 The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 49–50.
413 The Brothers Karamazov, p. 50. Joseph Frank points to these words as ‘those that Father Ambrose told Dostoevsky to convey to his wife’. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, Volume 5 (2002), p. 385.
414 The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 266–8.
415 Letter to Pobedonostsev, 9 (21) August 1879.
416 ‘Dostoevsky’s meeting with the Anti-Christ’ by I. I. Iasinsky, from Sekirin, pp. 226–7.
417 Sekirin, pp. 227–8.
418 The Adolescent, p. 15.
419 Devils, p. 499.
420 Crime and Punishment, p. 483.
421 Devils, p. 505.
422 Quotes are as printed in A Writer’s Diary, Volume 2, August 1880.
423 He had been developing this argument since The Adolescent, pp. 302ff. Towards the end of his life, Dostoevsky is often accused of foam-flecked nationalism, but his excesses deserve to be set in context. Even the cosmopolitan Turgenev wrote in an 1860 letter, ‘I cannot tell you how deeply I hate everything French and especially Parisian.’ (Figes, The Europeans, p. 259) This is, after all, the era of Italian and German unification, and the grand unifying theory that Dostoevsky posits in his Pushkin speech is not so very different from Victor Hugo’s idea of a federated Europe with Paris as its capital.
424 The Brothers Karamazov, p. 837.
425 The Brothers Karamazov, p. 841.
426 Letter to Anna, 8 June 1880.
427 Letter to Anna, 8 June 1880.
428 Sekirin, p. 253.
429 Sekirin, p. 253.
430 Letter to Pelageya Egorovna Guseva, 15 October 1880.
431 Crime and Punishment, pp. 538–9.
432 The Idiot, pp. 36–7.
433 Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, Volume 5 (2002), p. 561.
434 Letter to Nikolai Lyubimov, 8 November 1880.
435 The Adolescent, p. 338.
436 Crime and Punishment, p. 529.
437 Crime and Punishment, p. 347.
438 The Adolescent, p. 140.
439 Notebook for A Raw Youth, p. 464.
440 The Adolescent, p. 50.
&nbs
p; 441 The Adolescent, pp. 305–6.
442 Reminiscences, p. 346.
443 ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, from Notes from the Underground and Other Stories, pp. 651ff.
444 After Dostoevsky’s death, Maikov recalled: ‘“Oh, if only people could understand, then there would be paradise on earth,” he used to say.’ (Sekirin, p. 285)
445 Raskolnikov kisses the earth in repentance at the end of Crime and Punishment; Shatov urges Stavrogin to kiss the earth in Devils, but Stavrogin’s confession was never published and redemption eludes him (in contrast to his wife Maria, who kisses the earth when she prays); at the exact midpoint of The Brothers Karamazov Alyosha kisses the earth in holy rapture. It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, touching other worlds. (The Brothers Karamazov, p. 404)
446 Devils, p. 209.
447 Imperial Russia: A Source Book, ed. Basil Dmytryshyn (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), p. 314.
448 The Village of Stepanchikovo, p. xxi.
449 Dostoevsky Portrayed by his Wife, p. xi.
450 Dostoevsky Portrayed by his Wife, p. xvi.
451 The Adolescent, p. 232.
452 Notes from the Underground, p. 545.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
(with a note on the translation wars)
I am not a translator but Dostoevsky’s writing had to end up in English one way or another. Over the last hundred years, there have been heated debates about the translation of Dostoevsky’s work into English (and critiques of the debates, making the whole discussion a fractal nightmare). In the past couple of decades some have claimed that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have produced the most authoritative modern translations, notably David Remnick in his New Yorker essay, ‘The Translation Wars’. Gary Saul Morson, a literary critic and Slavist at Northwestern University, vehemently disagreed in an article on ‘The Pevearsion [sic] of Russian Literature’, where he argued that they ‘take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles’. By contrast, he thought Constance Garnett’s translations ‘magnificent’.
Undoubtedly Garnett has the dubious privilege, as Dostoevsky’s first popular translator,1 of fighting off each new challenger. Ernest Hemingway loved her translations, but Vladimir Nabokov hated them.2 Penguin translator David Magarshack felt that Garnett had failed to capture Dostoevsky’s humour (according to academic Cathy McAteer, his own translations restored Dostoevsky’s famed polyphony, but ‘some of Magarshack’s decisions irritated readers’). Joseph Frank uses Garnett’s translations because ‘she takes fewer liberties with the literal meaning than more recent translators’, but Pevear and Volokhonsky weren’t translating when he began his monumental project. Boris Jakim’s translations are well regarded but do not cover all of Dostoevsky’s works. Victor Terras, in his Reading Dostoevsky, is judicious: ‘Pevear’s translation serves the scholarly reader better, as it brings him or her closer to Dostoevsky’s craftsmanship. Garnett’s somewhat old-fashioned English has great charm and is close to the ethos of Dostoevsky’s Victorian narrator. It is not quite Dostoevsky, falling short of the prodigious energy of his dialogue, but the general reader may find it preferable to Pevear’s.’ She translated most of Dostoevsky’s fiction, allowing for a relatively consistent voice, but most importantly, I like her style (my dream that Oliver Ready will take a twenty-year sabbatical to translate the complete works is yet to be realised).
Dostoevsky in Love Page 25