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From the New York Times
Essay
Translating Tolstoy While Inciting Revolution
By Jennifer Wilson*
June 28, 2023
“Have you ever killed anybody?” a journalist asked the visitor from Russia. The reply, The New York Times reported the next day, was a no as emphatic as you would expect from someone yet to be caught for killing the head of the Russian secret police. The man went by the name Stepniak, a revolutionary nom de guerre — Russian for “man of the steppe.”
Stepniak, whose real name was Sergei Kravchinsky, was in New York in December 1890 preparing to lecture on nihilism at the Metropolitan Opera. Proceeds from the event were to benefit the Society to Befriend Working Girls, a charity, but this was primarily a hearts-and-minds trip, Stepniak told The Times: “We realize that foreign opinion of our country has a tremendous influence. In the sentiments of other people than our own we have found a lever which we may use to great advantage in our work.”
A year and a half later, Stepniak would meet his mightiest lever yet in the form of a 30-year-old English woman and new mother, who, desperate to pass the time while pregnant, had taken up Russian. Her name was Constance Garnett, and she is now known as the indefatigable translator of over 70 volumes of Russian literature. If you’ve read a Russian classic in English, you’ve likely read Garnett. D.H. Lawrence recalled seeing her toss finished pages onto “a pile on the floor without looking up” — a pile, he claimed, that rose “almost up to her knees.” Gary Saul Morson, a Russian literature scholar, once wrote: “I have often thought that what I do for a living is teach the Collected Works of Constance Garnett.”
There are more opinions of Garnett’s work than there are horses in “War and Peace” (which she nearly went blind translating). In a piece of fan mail, the writer Katherine Mansfield wrote: “I felt I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other world that you have revealed to us through those marvelous translations from the Russian. Your beautiful industry ends, Madam, in making us almost ungrateful.”
Add clairvoyance to Mansfield’s talents. Over time, Garnett’s detractors would make her out to be a prim and proper smotherer of the wild (male) Russian soul. Nabokov described her translations of Gogol as “always unbearably demure.” The Soviet writer Kornei Chukovsky complained that she dulled Dostoyevsky’s “convulsions of syntax,” reproducing “no volcano, but, rather, a flat lawn mowed in the English style.”
It’s true that Garnett could be strait-laced. When she first met Stepniak, she was aghast at one thing above all else. “To my horror,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir, “I found that he habitually carried books out of the British Museum reading room at the lunch-hour, and I could not make him feel it was a crime, since, as he said, he always took them back.” Yet the image of Garnett as a buttoned-up Victorian bookworm hides, much like a corset, her true shape. A socialist, Garnett understood her role as a translator to be revolutionary in the most literal sense: as an act of infiltration, a way of sneaking subversive information across borders.
The English, fresh from the Crimean War, saw Russia as the land of the czars, home to an autocratic regime and uncouth brutes obedient to it. Literature, Stepniak believed, could unveil a Russia full of doubters and dissenters, a nation of many voices, not all speaking the same language. In Garnett, he found a translator who could remain faithful to both the words on the page and the world he wanted to build beyond them.
Garnett was born Constance Black, to a middle-class family in Brighton in 1861, the same year that Alexander II abolished serfdom, putting her on something of a crash course with translation history; in 1895, she would translate a “A Sportsman’s Sketches” (1852), Ivan Turgenev’s searing fictional portrait of Russian peasants living in bondage. In Russia, the abolition of serfdom was part of a series of reforms meant to stave off revolution. But the country’s radical youth were not satisfied with mere reform: They were anarchists and socialists, and they were organized and armed. In 1878, 19-year-old Vera Zasulich shot the governor of St. Petersburg in a case that shocked Europe. Stepniak wrote a profile of Zasulich for his book “Underground Russia” (1882), a study of the country’s new revolutionaries. In England, “Underground Russia” was a smash hit, going through three printings the year it was translated. The whole nation was fascinated by these dynamite-happy young radicals and the land they hailed from.
Garnett arrived in London in 1884; her sister Clementina already mingled in leftist circles (she was friends with Eleanor Marx, Karl’s youngest daughter). Like many of her generation, Garnett frequented radical social clubs, including the Fabian Society and William Morris’s socialist league. She took a job as a librarian in London’s poor East End — not far from where thousands of Russian-Jewish immigrants had settled after fleeing pogroms — embarking, she reflected later, on a “new interesting life that seemed intensely romantic.” Soon she met Edward Garnett, an aspiring literary critic and editor. Edward was more skeptical than his girlfriend when it came to revolutionary politics. In a 1991 biography of Constance, Richard Garnett, the pair’s grandson, writes that “the young lovers had a row about Land Nationalization.”
But love conquered all. In 1889, the two married and moved to a cottage in the country. Two years later, Edward, who was in London for work, sent Constance a letter: “I have met a man after your heart — a Russian exile — and I have asked him down for a weekend.” The man was Felix Volkhovsky, a revolutionary who had escaped from Siberia, but who had made his way to England. “He had no home,” Constance wrote in her memoir, so “it was arranged that he should make our cottage his headquarters.” Volkhovsky suggested that Constance learn Russian. He gave her a dictionary and set her to work translating Ivan Goncharov’s novel “A Common Story” (1847), a tale of a provincial nobleman horrified by the cold commercialism of the capital. Constance learned Russian by translating novels, a few pages a day.
Volkhovsky introduced Constance to Stepniak, who was editing Free Russia, a magazine devoted to documenting the scourge of autocracy and the romance of revolution. The meeting was “one of the most important events of my life,” Constance wrote in her memoir: “Stepniak read my Goncharov translation, undertook to go over it with me, urged me to finish it.” Stepniak put her to work in other ways as well. Always in need of “innocent-looking emissaries,” as Richard Garnett put it, Stepniak enlisted Constance to travel to Russia, bearing “letters and books that could not safely be sent through the censored mails,” as well as, perhaps, money he had collected that would “help Russian political prisoners and exiles to escape.” During a nearly two-month stay in 1894, she managed to wrangle a couple meetings with Tolstoy, though not without some logistical difficulty. “These prophets,” she wrote in a letter home, “are dreadful people to deal with.”
At Stepniak’s urging, Constance had begun translating the complete works of Turgenev. She went in order, first tackling his debut novel, “Rudin” (1856), the story of a progressive intellectual who believes society must change but struggles to take action. Stepniak was to write the introductions, but their collaboration was cut short by a freak accident: In 1895, lost in thought, Stepniak walked in front of a moving train, dying instantly — a scene out of “Anna Karenina,” which Constance would translate six years later.
Despite the death of her mentor, she persevered as both translator and agitator. Her work on the Russian “greats” paid the bills, and garnered awards, but Constance also applied her labors to revolutionary materials. “I have done two days at translating Sophia Perovskaya,” she wrote to Edward in 1906, referring to the woman who helped plot the assassination of Alexander II, “and feel so cheered.” In 1908, she translated an eyewitness account of a worker’s revolt on a ship docked in Odessa, the Battleship Potemkin.
In March 1917, Nicholas II abdicated. For Constance, it was the culmination of everything she had worked for and dreamed of. “There is nothing — outside personal life — I have ever cared for as much,” she told Edward.
* Jennifer Wilson, a contributing essayist at the Book Review, has a Ph.D. in Russian literature and is working on a book about Constance Garnett.
Essay
Translating Tolstoy While Inciting Revolution
By Jennifer Wilson*
June 28, 2023
“Have you ever killed anybody?” a journalist asked the visitor from Russia. The reply, The New York Times reported the next day, was a no as emphatic as you would expect from someone yet to be caught for killing the head of the Russian secret police. The man went by the name Stepniak, a revolutionary nom de guerre — Russian for “man of the steppe.”
Stepniak, whose real name was Sergei Kravchinsky, was in New York in December 1890 preparing to lecture on nihilism at the Metropolitan Opera. Proceeds from the event were to benefit the Society to Befriend Working Girls, a charity, but this was primarily a hearts-and-minds trip, Stepniak told The Times: “We realize that foreign opinion of our country has a tremendous influence. In the sentiments of other people than our own we have found a lever which we may use to great advantage in our work.”
A year and a half later, Stepniak would meet his mightiest lever yet in the form of a 30-year-old English woman and new mother, who, desperate to pass the time while pregnant, had taken up Russian. Her name was Constance Garnett, and she is now known as the indefatigable translator of over 70 volumes of Russian literature. If you’ve read a Russian classic in English, you’ve likely read Garnett. D.H. Lawrence recalled seeing her toss finished pages onto “a pile on the floor without looking up” — a pile, he claimed, that rose “almost up to her knees.” Gary Saul Morson, a Russian literature scholar, once wrote: “I have often thought that what I do for a living is teach the Collected Works of Constance Garnett.”
There are more opinions of Garnett’s work than there are horses in “War and Peace” (which she nearly went blind translating). In a piece of fan mail, the writer Katherine Mansfield wrote: “I felt I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other world that you have revealed to us through those marvelous translations from the Russian. Your beautiful industry ends, Madam, in making us almost ungrateful.”
Add clairvoyance to Mansfield’s talents. Over time, Garnett’s detractors would make her out to be a prim and proper smotherer of the wild (male) Russian soul. Nabokov described her translations of Gogol as “always unbearably demure.” The Soviet writer Kornei Chukovsky complained that she dulled Dostoyevsky’s “convulsions of syntax,” reproducing “no volcano, but, rather, a flat lawn mowed in the English style.”
It’s true that Garnett could be strait-laced. When she first met Stepniak, she was aghast at one thing above all else. “To my horror,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir, “I found that he habitually carried books out of the British Museum reading room at the lunch-hour, and I could not make him feel it was a crime, since, as he said, he always took them back.” Yet the image of Garnett as a buttoned-up Victorian bookworm hides, much like a corset, her true shape. A socialist, Garnett understood her role as a translator to be revolutionary in the most literal sense: as an act of infiltration, a way of sneaking subversive information across borders.
The English, fresh from the Crimean War, saw Russia as the land of the czars, home to an autocratic regime and uncouth brutes obedient to it. Literature, Stepniak believed, could unveil a Russia full of doubters and dissenters, a nation of many voices, not all speaking the same language. In Garnett, he found a translator who could remain faithful to both the words on the page and the world he wanted to build beyond them.
Garnett was born Constance Black, to a middle-class family in Brighton in 1861, the same year that Alexander II abolished serfdom, putting her on something of a crash course with translation history; in 1895, she would translate a “A Sportsman’s Sketches” (1852), Ivan Turgenev’s searing fictional portrait of Russian peasants living in bondage. In Russia, the abolition of serfdom was part of a series of reforms meant to stave off revolution. But the country’s radical youth were not satisfied with mere reform: They were anarchists and socialists, and they were organized and armed. In 1878, 19-year-old Vera Zasulich shot the governor of St. Petersburg in a case that shocked Europe. Stepniak wrote a profile of Zasulich for his book “Underground Russia” (1882), a study of the country’s new revolutionaries. In England, “Underground Russia” was a smash hit, going through three printings the year it was translated. The whole nation was fascinated by these dynamite-happy young radicals and the land they hailed from.
Garnett arrived in London in 1884; her sister Clementina already mingled in leftist circles (she was friends with Eleanor Marx, Karl’s youngest daughter). Like many of her generation, Garnett frequented radical social clubs, including the Fabian Society and William Morris’s socialist league. She took a job as a librarian in London’s poor East End — not far from where thousands of Russian-Jewish immigrants had settled after fleeing pogroms — embarking, she reflected later, on a “new interesting life that seemed intensely romantic.” Soon she met Edward Garnett, an aspiring literary critic and editor. Edward was more skeptical than his girlfriend when it came to revolutionary politics. In a 1991 biography of Constance, Richard Garnett, the pair’s grandson, writes that “the young lovers had a row about Land Nationalization.”
But love conquered all. In 1889, the two married and moved to a cottage in the country. Two years later, Edward, who was in London for work, sent Constance a letter: “I have met a man after your heart — a Russian exile — and I have asked him down for a weekend.” The man was Felix Volkhovsky, a revolutionary who had escaped from Siberia, but who had made his way to England. “He had no home,” Constance wrote in her memoir, so “it was arranged that he should make our cottage his headquarters.” Volkhovsky suggested that Constance learn Russian. He gave her a dictionary and set her to work translating Ivan Goncharov’s novel “A Common Story” (1847), a tale of a provincial nobleman horrified by the cold commercialism of the capital. Constance learned Russian by translating novels, a few pages a day.
Volkhovsky introduced Constance to Stepniak, who was editing Free Russia, a magazine devoted to documenting the scourge of autocracy and the romance of revolution. The meeting was “one of the most important events of my life,” Constance wrote in her memoir: “Stepniak read my Goncharov translation, undertook to go over it with me, urged me to finish it.” Stepniak put her to work in other ways as well. Always in need of “innocent-looking emissaries,” as Richard Garnett put it, Stepniak enlisted Constance to travel to Russia, bearing “letters and books that could not safely be sent through the censored mails,” as well as, perhaps, money he had collected that would “help Russian political prisoners and exiles to escape.” During a nearly two-month stay in 1894, she managed to wrangle a couple meetings with Tolstoy, though not without some logistical difficulty. “These prophets,” she wrote in a letter home, “are dreadful people to deal with.”
At Stepniak’s urging, Constance had begun translating the complete works of Turgenev. She went in order, first tackling his debut novel, “Rudin” (1856), the story of a progressive intellectual who believes society must change but struggles to take action. Stepniak was to write the introductions, but their collaboration was cut short by a freak accident: In 1895, lost in thought, Stepniak walked in front of a moving train, dying instantly — a scene out of “Anna Karenina,” which Constance would translate six years later.
Despite the death of her mentor, she persevered as both translator and agitator. Her work on the Russian “greats” paid the bills, and garnered awards, but Constance also applied her labors to revolutionary materials. “I have done two days at translating Sophia Perovskaya,” she wrote to Edward in 1906, referring to the woman who helped plot the assassination of Alexander II, “and feel so cheered.” In 1908, she translated an eyewitness account of a worker’s revolt on a ship docked in Odessa, the Battleship Potemkin.
In March 1917, Nicholas II abdicated. For Constance, it was the culmination of everything she had worked for and dreamed of. “There is nothing — outside personal life — I have ever cared for as much,” she told Edward.
* Jennifer Wilson, a contributing essayist at the Book Review, has a Ph.D. in Russian literature and is working on a book about Constance Garnett.
