Briefly. Dostoyevsky on one page.

I have only just realised that I may have confused the readers with the title of this earlier post, Dostoyevsky on one page. I didn't mean one paper page, which takes 200-500 words, but one internet page, which takes the whole of Crime and Punishment, all 211,591 words of the novel.

Dostoyevsky, 1872.

To compensate, I'd like to recommend an invaluable Russian resource, Брифли. Краткое содержание книг at Briefly.ru. It is in Russian only but these days you can always use machine translation. Briefly offers condensed summaries of world's classic novels. Crime and Punishment, for example, is summarised in 1500 words. Briefly also gives estimated times you'd need to read the summary and the whole book. In the case of Crime and Punishment, it is 5-10 minutes for the summary and 8-9 hours to read the novel in full.

When I first found Briefly I thought it was a collection of students' cribs, but it is based on a printed book, All the Masterpieces of World Literature in Short Summaries, compiled and edited by V.I. Novikov ("Все шедевры мировой литературы в кратком изложении. Сюжеты и характеры", ред. и сост. В.И.Новиков, М., "Олимп"-АСТ, 1996.)

If you are a student too busy to read great novels in full or want to impress a date with your knowledge of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, or if you are an honest reader and just want to refresh in your memory the plot of a book you've read twenty or thirty years ago, Briefly is for you.

A Simple Matter.

 (Translating Crime and Punishment)

Dostoyevsky by Perov, 1872.

A simple matter of checking one phrase in the Pevear/Volokhonskaya’s translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment left me doubting whether they are as good as publishers and reviewers tell us. 

Zdenka Pregelj's Russia Past and Present published an excerpt from the glowing review of Pevear/Volokhonskaya’s version in Humanities magazine (full text here):

"

"In Crime and Punishment, there is a sentence that goes like this: ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Richard Pevear lets the words hang in the air, along with a note of faint bafflement. From his Paris apartment, one half of the world’s only celebrity translation team is recollecting some of the knotty, cross-lingual jumbles that he has spent his working life trying to untangle.

“I came running to Larissa”—Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear’s wife of thirty years and collaborator on twenty-one works of Russian-to-English translation—“and said, ‘Can that be? Is that what he said?’ And she checked and said yes. ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about  it.’” Reassured, if still skeptical, he jotted it down and moved on to Dostoyevsky’s next syntax-warping creation.

"

After this dramatic opening, the whole review dances around this ‘simple’ phrase. 

Why was Pevear baffled? Because of the apparent repetitiveness of the phrase? I thought there was something suspicious about it. It can’t be that Dostoyevsky is as repetitive as this. His style is different from the beautifully succinct Turgenev, or the elaborately detailed, thoroughly explorative Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky writes in a semi-colloquial, almost chatty way, as though he is sitting at a tea table and telling a story to a group of friends. At times, it is sloppy, or seems so.

I searched the Russian text of Crime and Punishment to find the phrase that baffled Pevear. (See 'Dostoyevsky on one page') This is how it goes (from Part I, beginning of Chapter VI):

Дело было самое обыкновенное и не заключало в себе ничего такого особенного.

It's not repetitive at all, it's a perfectly normal phrase. I'd translate it something like this:

[It turned out that] It was quite simple and there was nothing unusual about it. 

My wife, a native English speaker, thinks that 'and' is better replaced with a semi-colon. She suggested: 

In fact it was perfectly simple; there was nothing out of the ordinary about it.

You can argue about the first part of the sentence, whether 'the matter' is needed there. It appears in phrases like 

“В чём дело?” - ‘What’s the matter?’

“Это не ваше дело!” - ‘It’s none of your business’

“Я к вам по делу” - ‘I have business to discuss’.

“Дело [оказалось] серьезное”. - ‘It’s a serious matter.’

But the second part is definitely wrong. That's why it sounds repetitive in English.

"Ничего особенного" can mean 'nothing complicated.' For example, when you ask ‘Is it a difficult problem?’, you can get an answer ‘Nothing complicated.’ But here, in Dostoyevsky’s context it's definitely 'nothing extraordinary, nothing unusual, nothing suspicious'. 

When you read the Humanities article between the lines, you can see that every time Pevear, who has 'only a basic Russian' as the author mentions, has doubts, Volokhonskaya bullies him into accepting her version.

Publishers have built such a juggernaut of PV's translations, probably because of 'live' copyright, it's unstoppable now.

You can get a Redmolotov t-shirt with the opening line of Crime and Punishment in Garnett's translation: 'On an exceptionally hot evening early in July...' Click on the image.

The full paragraph from Crime and Punishment in Russian (from Lib.ru/Классика):

"

Впоследствии Раскольникову случилось как-то узнать, зачем именно мещанин и баба приглашали к себе Лизавету. Дело было самое обыкновенное и не заключало в себе ничего такого особенного. Приезжее и забедневшее семейство продавало вещи, платье и проч., всё женское. Так как на рынке продавать невыгодно, то и искали торговку, а Лизавета этим занималась: брала комиссии, ходила по делам и имела большую практику, потому что была очень честна и всегда говорила крайнюю цену: какую цену скажет, так тому и быть. Говорила же вообще мало, и как уже сказано, была такая смиренная и пугливая...

"

The same paragraph, in Garnett’s translation (from Gutenberg): 

"

Later on Raskolnikov happened to find out why the huckster and his wife had invited Lizaveta. It was a very ordinary matter and there was nothing exceptional about it. A family who had come to the town and been reduced to poverty were selling their household goods and clothes, all women's things. As the things would have fetched little in the market, they were looking for a dealer. This was Lizaveta's business. She undertook such jobs and was frequently employed, as she was very honest and always fixed a fair price and stuck to it. She spoke as a rule little and, as we have said already, she was very submissive and timid.

"

Update: It turns out that the phrase quoted in Humanities article didn't even make into P/V published translation. The actual sentence in the book runs like this: 'It was a most ordinary matter, and there was nothing very special about it.' Thanks to Anatoly Vorobey who found it on Google Books here. Which makes the Simple Matter even more baffling. See Languagehat's post and discussion of the phrase.

Update two: In David Magarschak's translation, which I have, the sentence reads: 

It was a most ordinary sort of business, and there was nothing at all remarkable about it.

Disclosure: Tetradki is an affiliate of Redmolotov.com. Every time you buy a Redmolotov t-shirt, Tetradki gets a small commission.

Dostoyevsky on One Page.

Dickens and Dostoyevsky.

I was looking for a particular phrase in Crime and Punishment today. (Read A Simple Matter) The full text of Dostoyevsky's novel is on many Russian sites but they usually break it into chapters or parts which makes it impossible to search the full body of text in one place, you have to go from page to page repeating the search.

After having spent some time going from site to site I found one where the whole novel is on one page, here, on Lib.ru/Классика website.

In most word processors, Pages, Word, Open Office, you can do a quick search in text by typing Command+F on a Mac or Control+F on a Windows machine, and then type a key word or phrase in the search window. Not everybody knows that the same trick works in internet browsers. Type the same command and a small search window opens within the browser. In Safari and Chrome it opens at the top, in Firefox it's at the bottom. Type in your key word and the window will show how many times it appears in the text, if any. Click on the arrows in the search window to go straight to the place in the text, no matter how long, where the word is used.

The collage with this post refers to the hoax started by 'Sophie Harvey' in the Dickensian. She claimed to have found a letter by Dostoyevsky describing his meeting with Dickens in London. A number of scholars and critics fell for it. Read Languagehat's post with a link to Eric Naiman's exhaustive investigation into the identity of hoaxer.

In the collage I put Dickens and Dostoyevsky over the photo of a meeting between Lenin and Stalin in 1922, famous for being radically 'photoshopped.' If reposting put in a link to this post.

Russian Emigrants: 'Shiftless and undependable'.

WS Maugham.

There is a persistent romanticised view of the Russian post-Revolution emigration: the noble, impoverished and dignified in their suffering intellectuals fleeing the horrors of bolshevist regime.

The reality was, of course, far from romantic. And by the end of 1930s the attitude to Russian emigrants had changed.

W Somerset Maugham's novel Christmas Holiday (1939) is an exploration of the Raskolnikov question, first articulated by Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment: can you kill a fellow human being to prove yourself that you can and in doing so to prove that you are a superior being. An experiment that was part of the revolutionary psychology.

Christmas Holiday is one of the most 'Russian' works of Maugham. Possibly, more insightful than Ashenden, the writer's account of his work as the British secret agent in Russia in 1917. The book is full of witty observations on Russians and comparisons with the English and the French.  

One of the main characters in the book is Lydia, a young Russian woman who works in an upmarket brothel under the name of 'Princess Olga'. It is through her that Maugham makes his comments.

This one is when Charley, an Englishman who comes to Paris to spend Christmas, meets Lydia:

"

Tell the Princess Olga to come here." Then to Charley: "She's Russian. Of course since the revolution we have been swamped with Russians, we're fed to the teeth with them and their Slav temperament; for a time the clients were amused by it, but they're tired of them now. And then they're not serious. They're noisy and quarrelsome. The truth is, they're barbarians, and they don't know how to behave. But Princess Olga is different. She has principles. You can see that she's been well brought up. She has something, there's no denying it.

"

And later in the book, when we learn more about Lydia:

"

It was true that her father had been a professor of some small distinction at the university, but in Russia, before the revolution, and since then Paris swarmed with princes and counts and guardsmen who were driving taxis or doing manual labour. Everyone looked upon the Russians as shiftless and undependable. People were sick of them. Lydia's mother, whose grandfather had been a serf, was herself hardly more than a peasant, and the professor had married her in accordance with his liberal principles; but she was a pious woman and Lydia had been brought up with strict principles. It was in vain that she reasoned with herself; it was true that the world was different now and one must move with the times: she could not help it, she had an instinctive horror of becoming a man's mistress.

"

Later in the book we discover that Lydia is in fact different from other Russians, or at least doesn't fit with the stereotype that had formed, according to Maugham, among the French.

The full text of the novel is here (link takes to the passage quoted in this post) and a Russian translation is here.  

Can! or Another Example of Russian Conciseness

'Russian verbosity' is a long-standing stereotype supported by mammoths like 'War and Peace' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Maugham, in Ashenden, even goes so far as to claim that all his carefully laid plans to stop the bolshevik takeover in 1917 (the writer was on a secret mission in Petrograd during the events) were ruined because members of his team preferred to talk and not to act.

Anyone, who really works with the language, would agree with the opposite: Russian in fact is very concise. Take for instance The Penguin Russian Course AБВ. Before saying anything else about the language it warns: Russian doesn't have articles, 'is' and 'are' are omitted in the present tense and there is no need for additional 'do' or 'does' in the interrogative. How many words do we instantly drop?

Here is a good illustration. I was experimenting with various 'inspirational' designs, in English and Russian, and came up with this one, based on Howard Miller's 'We Can Do It' poster (also referred to as 'Rosie the Riveter', confusing it with Norman Rockwell's Rosie). There is a wonderful story behind it illustrating the evolution of American socrealism (read here), but in this post I just want to point out the conciseness of Russian phrase structure.

In English it wouldn't look or sound right if you just put 'Can!' even though Buzz Lightyear does use it after a flight skills demo in response to Woody's 'Toys can't fly!' challenge.

But in Russian not only the auxiliary 'to be' is dropped in the present tense, but it is also grammatically correct, stylistically neutral (usually) and very common in speech if the first person pronoun is dropped. The sentence appears to be without a subject which is only implied. The object 'it' is also omitted in sentences like this. The three-word English sentence 'it is light' in Russian is just 'светло". (A little note: what is this 'It' in 'It's light'? is it some sort of Higher Power or Superior Being running things for us? Has anyone investigated it?)

These features of Russian sentence structure pose certain difficulties for students and translators, but once mastered – not that difficult! – they provide obvious advantages in speech and, as seen here, in design.

Note: We Can Do It poster is not copyrighted and is in free domain. Which partly explains its popularity compared for instance to Rockwell's Rosie, which is copyrighted. This design is ©A.Anichkin.

Dostoyevsky's Dog Mystery

Convicts en route to Siberia, 1860s.
The obelisk marks border between Europe and Asia.

Some common names for a dog in English: Rex, Rover, Fido, Lassie (Scottish) and Meg (Welsh).

Some common dog names in Russian: Shárik, Bóbik, Zhúchka and Polkán.

Many of these were immortalised in the great works of literature.

The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a member of an anti-tsarist liberal discussion group in 1840s. The group was exposed, its members arrested and Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death. He was already standing in front of the firing squad when clemency came. He was sent to Siberia to do hard labour and stayed there until 1854.

There, in prison, one creature helped him survive and keep sanity – the prison dog, similar to the one in the painting above.

Mock execution in 1849

Below is an excerpt from the novel The House of the Dead (Amazon link, in Russian "Записки из мертвого дома", also translated as Memoirs from the House of The Dead, Notes from the Dead House, Buried Alive, 1881, and Prison Life in Siberia, 1888), an autobiographical account of the Dostoyevsky's experience, where he writes about the dog.

But there is a mystery there. Why did the translator, Constance Garnett, call the dog Bull in English? In Russian he is called Sharik (little ball) which is a common, practically generic name for a dog, usually of unknown breed. It's like Rover or Meg, if it were a Welsh farm dog. Was there a point in time, around a hundred years ago when Bull was a common name for a dog? Or is it a typo (bull instead of ball), caused by Garnett's handwriting or a defect in her typewriter? And why translate a dog's name anyway?

I know, Garnett's translations have been criticised, but she was a prolific, hard-working writer and helped to introduce a huge body of classic Russian literature to Western reading public. Her translations are still in wide circulation. So the text deserves a respectful analysis. If you have access to other translations, please let me know how Sharik is dealt with.

The quote (electronic text from here):

'When I returned in the evening to the convict prison, having finished my afternoon's work, fatigued and harassed, a deep sadness took possession of me. "How many thousands of days have I to pass like this one?" Always the same thought. I walked about alone and meditated as night fell, when, suddenly, near the palisade behind the barracks, I saw my friend, Bull, who ran towards me.

'Bull was the dog of the prison; for the prison has its dog as companies of infantry, batteries of artillery, and squadrons of cavalry have theirs. He had been there for a long time, belonged to no one, looked upon every one as his master, and lived on the remains from the kitchen. He was a good-sized black dog, spotted with white, not very old, with intelligent eyes, and a bushy tail. No one caressed him or paid the least attention to him. As soon as I arrived I made friends with him by giving him a piece of bread. When I patted him on the back he remained motionless, looked at me with a pleased expression, and gently wagged his tail.

'That evening, not having seen me the whole day, me, the first person who in so many years had thought of caressing him he ran towards me, leaping and barking. It had such an effect on me that I could not help embracing him. I placed his head against my body. He placed his paws on my shoulders and looked me in the face.

"Here is a friend sent to me by destiny," I said to myself, and during the first weeks, so full of pain, every time that I came back from work I hastened, before doing anything else, to go to the back of the barracks with Bull, who leaped with joy before me. I took his head in my hands and kissed it. At the same time a troubled, bitter feeling pressed my heart. I well remember thinking and taking pleasure in the thought that this was my one, my only friend in the world my faithful dog, Bull.

Other famous Russian dog stories: Kashtanka by Chekhov and Heart of a Dog by Bulgakov (also with Sharik)
Discussions on The House of the Dead on Languagehat are here and here.
This post is also on my Running with Dogs blog.
Russian text and attributions below the cut.

Susan Sontag: who would I be without Dostoyevsky?

The very first time I raised to myself the problem of a poor translation was when I started going to the opera, in Chicago, when I was sixteen. There I held in my hands for the first time an en face translation – the original language on the left (by this time I had some French and Italian) and the English on the right – and I was stunned and mystified by the blatant inaccuracy of the translations. (It was to be many years before I understood why the words in a libretto cannot be translated literally.) Opera excepted, I never asked myself, in those early years of reading literature in translation, about what I was missing. It was as if I felt it were my job, as a passionate reader, to see through the faults or limitations of a translation – as one sees through (or looks past) the scratches on a bad print of a beloved old film one is seeing once again. Translations were a gift, for which I would always be grateful. What – rather, who – would I be without Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov?

from The World as India (London 2002)
St Jerome lecture on the nature of translation

The nature of translation was a central subject of interest for Susan Sontag, both in the narrow sense of interpreting a text in the one language into a different language and in the wider, philosophical sense of how reality is interpreted in a work of art.

The Russian version of this post is here, the lecture in full (highly recommend to all professional translators!) is here