Tag: Russian literature

Books across Borders—Constance Garnett and her Translations

Adele Fasick2 Comments

Last Sunday (February 11, 2022), the New York Times featured an article about the growing importance of translated books in the United States. Now that many Americans are becoming used to watching international movies, television, and websites, it’s natural that books from around the world are also becoming more popular. The Author’s Guild and other writers’ associations encourage publishers to acknowledge this importance by including the name of the translator on the front cover of every translated book. We will no doubt see more attention paid to translators in the future, but today I want to pay tribute to a woman whose pioneering work in translation influenced some of the most important English-language writers of the twentieth century, including D. H . Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway.  

Constance Garnett was born in Brighton, England, in 1861. She was educated at Brighton and Hove High School and then studied Greek and Latin at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1883, she moved to London and worked as a governess and later as a librarian. In London she met Edward Garnett, who was a reader for a publishing company. The two married in 1889, and two years later, her husband introduced her to several Russian exiles with whom the couple became friendly. The exiles encouraged Constance to try translating some Russian writers into English to make them available to a wider range of readers. Before long, Constance started studying Russian and plunged into the work.

Constance Garnett with her son David

Ivan Goncharov’s A Common Story was Garnett’s first translation to be published, and that was the beginning of a long, industrious career. During her lifetime, Garnett translated works by Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov. Works by these authors had been almost inaccessible to most English-speaking readers until Garnett translated them and they were published in England and then in the United States. By the time her career ended, she had translated and published 71 Russian books. Many of these versions still remain in print, although other translators have produced newer translations.

How did Constance Garnett manage to translate so quickly? She did it mostly by working incessantly. It was her habit to sit in her garden with a pile of Russian manuscripts beside her as she worked. She would translate quickly, seldom stopping to look anything up, and not planning ahead, but somehow she produced readable versions of  books that usually caught the spirit of the original. Her translations have been both praised and criticized by Russian scholars and still remain controversial. A 2005 article in the New Yorker “The Translation Wars” by David Remnick tells the story of some of the arguments and disagreements about her work.

The widespread availability of Russian translations had a dramatic impact on English-language literature during the 20th century.  One result, which is unfortunately no longer available to us, was the appearance of a play called “The Idiots Karamazov” at the Yale Repertory Theatre during the early 1970s. Starring in the role of Constance Garnett was a young student named Meryl Streep. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could find that show streaming on our TV screen and watch it before settling down to read Dostoyevsky? 

Three Women to Remember from 2021 Books

Adele Fasick3 Comments

2021 has been a difficult year, and most of us will be glad to see it gone. We started the year with the happy news that vaccines against Covid 19 had become available, but after a tumultuous twelve months, we are still struggling to overcome hostile variants of the virus.

One of the few good things that could be said about the year is that for those of us who spent much of our time at home, it offered an opportunity to catch up on our reading. As I recall the books I have read this year, I am especially grateful for the ones that introduced me to women who have lived through some of the most fascinating periods in history.

Here are brief introductions to three women whose stories have most captivated me during 2021.

Briseis and Achilles

Briseis, a Trojan woman who lived during the tumultuous years of the Trojan War, tells her story in Pat Barker’s book, The Silence of the Girls. Briseis was a Trojan woman who was captured by the Greeks and given as a slave to Achilles. Briseis narrates the story and describes the difficult adjustment she makes to her suddenly diminished status. She paints a convincing picture of life in a camp of soldiers during a nine-year war that has stalled. The soldiers are tormented not only by the fighting, but also by a plague, which kills many of them. Briseis is an unforgettable woman and her story continues in the second book of Barker’s trilogy, The Trojan Women. We will have to wait a little longer for the final volume of the trilogy, which is promised, but not yet scheduled.

Anna Dostoevskaya

Moving forward in time, I found an unexpected woman—a woman I had never heard of—who played an important part in world literature by marrying the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky. In his biography, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky, Andrew D. Kaufman tells the story of Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya. Born in 1846 to a middle-class family she became a stenographer and was hired by Dostoyevsky during a period when he was struggling to complete his novel The Gambler. The two fell in love and married. Despite his many gifts, Dostoyevsky’s ability to write was threatened by his gambling habit. As his business manager, editor and sometime publisher, Anna was able to guide his career and help him to become a major literary figure in Russia and in much of the world. After Dostoyevsky’s death Anna continued to publish and publicize his books. She worked tirelessly to keep his books in print and available to readers in Russia and all of Europe. I wonder whether his fame would have been as great and his genius so well-remembered if he had not had Anna to keep his name alive for the almost half century she lived after his death.

Another woman who made a lasting impact on me during this year was Fiona Hill author of There is Nothing for You Here. Hill grew up in the North of England, an area caught in economic depression because of the closure of the coal mines. Mining had been the major employment option for most people in the community, including Fiona Hill’s parents. With the disappearance of mining, Hill’s parents encouraged their children to get an education and move away from the North. Even with the encouragement of her family, it was not easy for Fiona Hill to take advantage of the educational opportunities available. Eventually, however, she attended university, moved to the United States, and became a public figure when she testified at the Congressional hearings on Trump’s impeachment.

Fiona Hill

Hill’s wide-ranging experience gives her insight into the educational systems not only in England but in the United States and in Russia. Her book is not so much a personal story, but a more general account of the barriers that keep working-class children from developing their skills and using their talents to become important participants in their communities. While leaders sign proclamations and declare goals, Fiona Hill reminds us that it is individuals who will have to learn to live in the new world that is coming. There Is Nothing for You Here points the way to changes our governments could make to prepare young people for that world.

Happy Reading for a Happy 2022!      

The Stenographer Who Saved a Genius– Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya

Adele Fasick3 Comments

During the mid-nineteenth century, Russia was a part of Europe but felt very separate from it. During that time, Russian middle and upper classes, women were proud of having more rights than they would have in other European countries. The right to an education was particularly important and a strong feminist movement grew up. Women were encouraged to educate themselves and become self-supporting. Surprisingly enough, one of the most liberating career paths for women was learning stenography. This was the path chosen by Anna Grigoryeva Dostoevskaya, a woman who was destined to play an important role in Russian literature.

Anna was born in 1848 in St. Petersburg. Her family encouraged her to be independent and read widely. She graduated with high honors from high school and decided to become a stenographer, one of the few careers in which a woman could earn a living. It was a stroke of luck when one of her teachers recommended her for a job with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was already one of her favorite authors. He had published several articles and two novels during the 1840s, but his career had been interrupted when he was sentenced to five years of exile in Siberia.

At the time Dostoyevsky met Anna, he was struggling to rebuild his career. His first wife had died, leaving him with a stepson to raise, his reputation as a writer had faded, and he was struggling to fulfill his contract to complete a novel called The Gambler. He called upon a friend to help him find a stenographer and luckily the friend recommended Anna, who had been one of his students.

Eventually, with Anna’s patient help, Dostoyevsky completed his novel and was able to fulfill his contract. During the weeks they worked together, he also fell in love with his faithful helper  and proposed to her despite the twenty-year difference in their ages. During the years before meeting Anna, Dostoyevsky had drifted into a life of gambling, which led to debts that interfered with his writing career. No one could have predicted that a 19-year-old stenographer would save him from his gambling addiction and his precarious life, but that is what happened.

With the help of Anna’s mother, who agreed to pawn the girl’s dowry and give the money to the newly- weds, Fyodor and Anna were able to leave Russia and spend four years in other European countries. Anna’s example of hard work and willing sacrifice inspired Dostoyevsky to continue writing despite the pull of the ever-tempting gambling casinos. Anna tried hard to understand his addiction and even spent a secret day at the casino alone so that she could better understand how the insidious promise of quick riches could tempt almost anyone to continue playing.

Throughout the early years of their marriage, Anna helped her husband continue his writing. She understood his need to gamble and helped him through the difficult years until they were able to move back to St. Petersburg and pay off their debts. During the rest of Dostoyevsky’s life, Anna managed his writing career, even starting a publishing company to sell his books. When he died in 1881, Anna was only 35 years old, but she dedicated the rest of her life to preserving his books  and his memory.

For many years, Anna’s role in Dostoyevsky’s life has been downplayed in accounts of his life, but a recent biography has now presented a more balanced view of her importance. The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky by Andrew Kaufman (Riverhead Books 2021) offers a fresh view of the creative partnership between these two remarkable people.