The Other Side

Alfred Kubin: Illustration for Die andere Seite (1908)

I picked up a hardback copy of this fascinating novel in a Hospice Shop the other day:

Alfred Kubin: The Other Side (1969)

To be perfectly honest, I didn't really need it, as I've owned a copy of the Penguin Modern Classics edition for a number of years:

Alfred Kubin: The Other Side (1973)

The book holds a strange appeal for me, I'm not quite sure why.

I first noticed it on my eldest brother's shelves, when he was still living at home before leaving for university. A bit later I found a copy of my own to read (he was a stickler for not allowing anyone else to crease the spines or covers of his books by opening them more than a crack).

One day I mentioned to him that I'd been reading it. "I don't know what you're talking about," he replied. So that was that.

I presumed from his response that he must have forgotten all about the book shortly after buying it, and had no idea that it was still in his collection. Or perhaps he was just in a bad mood that day, and couldn't be bothered discussing it.

It did seem a curious omen, though.

Alfred Kubin: The Other Side (1967)

Die andere Seite was Kubin's only novel. He wrote it in 1908, after finishing a long series of drawings. Feeling exhausted and unable to create anything new in that medium:

Instead, in order to do something, no matter what, to unburden myself, I now began to compose and write down an adventure story. The ideas came flooding into my mind in superabundance; they forced me to work day and night so that in twelve weeks' time my fantastic novel 'Die andere Seite' [The Other Side] was finished. During the next four weeks I provided it with illustrations. Afterwards, to be sure, I was exhausted and irritable, and I entertained serious misgivings about my daring enterprise. I possessed no reliable judgment in literary matters ...

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Nicola Perscheid: Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin (1877–1959)

It's been compared to Kafka's Castle, to Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East, to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. It isn't really very like any of them, though.

Gustav Meyrink: Der Golem: Frontispiece (1915)

What it does resemble more than a little is Gustav Meyrink's The Golem.

Gustav Meyrink: Der Golem (1915)

That isn't entirely surprising:

The illustrations for the book were originally intended for The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, but as that book was delayed, Kubin instead worked his illustrations into his own novel.

- Wikipedia: Alfred Kubin

It's hard to know how literally to take this statement - quoted from Siegfried Schödel's Studien zu den phantastischen Erzählungen Gustav Meyrinks (Nuremberg: Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1965): 27. If The Golem was written "between 1907 and 1914", then "first published in serial form from December 1913 to August 1914 in the periodical Die Weißen Blätter", before being published in book form in 1915, it's a bit difficult to see how Kubin could have been working on illustrations for it as early as 1907-8.

Certainly there's no mention of the fact in the short autobiography appended to the successive editions of Die andere Seite published in Kubin's lifetime (and finally printed in full in the 1967 English translation of The Other Side). What he does say is that it coincided with a period of aimlessness and depression after the death of his very controlling - and emotionally distant - father in November 1907.

The atmosphere of Prague's tangled old streets, omnipresent in Meyrink's somewhat plotless novel, may well have contributed something to Kubin's creation of his Central Asian Dream Kingdom, constructed by the narrator's old schoolfriend Patera with the intention of preserving only broken-down, abandoned relics of the Europe he's left behind. Nor is it difficult to see in the name "Patera" an echo of Kubin's recent paternal loss.

Joseph Karl Stieler: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

The life-and-death struggle between the paternalistic ruler Patera - at one point explicitly equated with the mad "Dream King" Ludwig II of Bavaria [223-24] - and his upstart nemesis Hercules Bell, the American tycoon, who turns up in the Dream Kingdom fresh from "poking about in the islands of New Zealand" [172], tempts one to posit an elaborate satire on Goethe's famous vision of America and the New World as offering a fresh, clean slate for mankind to write upon:

Amerika, du hast es besser
Als unser Kontinent, der alte,
Hast keine verfallenen Schlösser
Und keine Basalte.
Dich stört nicht im Innern,
Zu lebendiger Zeit,
Unnützes Erinnern
Und vergeblicher Streit.

Benutzt die Gegenwart mit Glück!
Und wenn nun Eure Kinder dichten,
Bewahre sie ein gut Geschick
Vor Ritter-, Räuber- und Gespenstergeschichten.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Den Vereinigten Staaten" (1831)

America you're better off
than our continentthe old one
you've got no fallen castles
no ruins to build on
your inner life
is free
of futile strife
and fruitless memory

live in the momentgood luck to you
and when your kids write poetry
try to keep them well away
from robbers ghosts and chivalry

[trans. JR]

Nicholas Roerich: Svyatogor (1942)

Kubin's Dream Kingdom, by contrast, is made up nothing but old ruins, old grudges, and all the detritus of the Old World. It is, admittedly, set on the opposite side of the globe from the United States, in the ageless steppes of Central Asia, inhabited by a strange blue-eyed race of mystics, who appear to have leased the land he builds on to the absurdly rich - and equally enigmatic - Patera.

It seems unlikely that Kubin was familiar with the work of his near contemporary Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) at the time he wrote Die andere Seite - Roerich's Symbolist designs did not really become famous in the West until he created the sets for Borodin's Prince Igor (1909) and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913) for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

One can see in him something of the same fascination with this ancient, mystic land of Nomad empires and esoteric religions, however. Certainly H. P. Lovecraft, whose fabled plateau of Leng was avowedly inspired by Roerich's paintings, must have thought so.

Marvel Comics: Conan the Savage #4 (1995)

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Max Ernst: Europe after the Rain (1940-42)

But all this is taking us quite a way from Kubin's novel, composed in 1908, long before World War I - let alone the even more Apocalyptic World War II - had convulsed his native Austria in blood and flame.

He describes his rather dismal experiences of privation and want in both wars in the Autobiography at the end of his novel, but nowhere makes the explicit connection between the cataclysmic fall of Patera's Dream Kingdom with those of the Hapsburg Empire and Hitler's thousand-year Reich.

Might we then read Die andere Seite as a premonitory vision?

... not nonsense, but the confused fragments of a dream: a dream that no sane man could bear to dream: a waking memory of what was to be.

- Alan Garner, Elidor (1965): 48.

Certainly many of the descriptions Kubin gives of himself would scarcely qualify as sane - perhaps "highly strung" would be the most diplomatic formula for some of the behaviour he confesses to at this particular time.

Max Ernst: Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

In any case, he wouldn't be the only one to report having had strange dreams and visions before the advent of the "War to end all Wars":

In October [1913], while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision last about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.

Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice spoke. "Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it." That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.

I asked myself whether these visions pointed to a revolution, but could not really imagine anything of the sort. And so I drew the conclusion that they had to do with me myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war did not occur to me at all.

Soon afterward, in the spring and early summer of 1914, I had a thrice-repeated dream that in the middle of summer an Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice. I saw, for example, the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings. All living green things were killed by frost. This dream came in April and May, and for the last time in June, 1914.

In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos. This dream, however, had an unexpected end. There stood a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd ...

On August 1 the world war broke out.

- Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. Trans. Richard & Clara Winston. 1965. Revised edition (New York: Vintage, 1973): 175-76.

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Alfred Kubin: Der Staat (1901)

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Henry Torrens: The Forgotten Man of the 1001 Nights

Henry Whitelock Torrens (1806-1852)

Should you ever have occasion to look up the name of Henry Torrens on Wikipedia, you may have some difficulty actually locating him. You'll find Major-General Sir Henry Torrens KCB, author of that standard textbook Field Exercise and Evolutions of the Army (1824):

Sir Henry Torrens (1779-1828)

Chances are you'll also find his grandson, the even more eminent Lieutenant General Sir Henry D'Oyley Torrens KCB KCMG, without too much trouble:

Felice Beato: Henry D'Oyley Torrens (1833-1889)

What you won't find, unless you look very hard indeed, is the entry on Henry Whitelock Torrens, son of the first, and father of the second of the military gentlemen listed above:

Henry Whitelock Torrens (20 May 1806 – 16 August 1852), son of Major-General Henry Torrens, was born on 20 May 1806. He received his B.A. at Christ Church, Oxford (where he was a president of the United Debating Society), and entered the Inner Temple. After a short service under the Foreign Office, he obtained a writership from the Court of Directors of the East India Company and arrived in India in November 1828 and held various appointments at Meerut. In 1835 he joined the Secretariat, in which he served in several departments under Sir William Hay Macnaghten. In 1839 he assisted in the editing of the Calcutta Star, a weekly paper, which became a daily paper called the Eastern Star. He was secretary (1840–1846) and a Vice-President (1843–1845) to the Asiatic Society of Bengal (now the Asiatic Society). In December 1846, he was appointed Agent to the Governor-General at Murshidabad. Here in his endeavours to improve the Nizamat administration, his relations with the Nawab Nizam and his officials became greatly strained.
He was a clever essayist as well as a journalist and scholar, and his scattered papers were deservedly collected and published at Calcutta in 1854.
Torrens died of dysentery at Calcutta while on a visit to the Governor-General on 16 August 1852 and was buried in the Lower Circular Road Cemetery.

A bit of a nobody, one might feel tempted to conclude: a lawyer and journalist, who died young, leaving behind a son and a pile of "scattered papers."

What this entry fails to mention, however, is his importance as the author of the first serious attempt at a complete English translation of the 1001 Nights from the Arabic. He is included on the page devoted to Translations of One Thousand and One Nights, however:

Henry Torrens translated the first fifty nights from Calcutta II, which were published in 1838. Having heard that Edward William Lane began his own translation, Torrens abandoned his work.

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890)

There's a bit more to it than that, however. Luckily Richard Burton, in the preface to his own complete 1885 translation of the collection, is somewhat more expansive:

At length in 1838, Mr. Henry Torrens, B.A., Irishman, lawyer ("of the Inner Temple") and Bengal Civilian, took a step in the right direction; and began to translate, "The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night," (1 vol., 8vo, Calcutta: W. Thacker and Co.) from the Arabic of the Ægyptian (!) MS. edited by Mr. (afterwards Sir) William H. Macnaghten. The attempt, or rather the intention, was highly creditable; the copy was carefully moulded upon the model and offered the best example of the verbatim et literatim style. But the plucky author knew little of Arabic, and least of what is most wanted, the dialect of Egypt and Syria. His prose is so conscientious as to offer up spirit at the shrine of letter; and his verse, always whimsical, has at times a manner of Hibernian whoop which is comical when it should be pathetic. Lastly he printed only one volume of a series which completed would have contained nine or ten.

- Richard F. Burton, "The Translator's Foreword." A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, 10 vols. Benares: Kamashastra Society, 1885. vol.1: xi.

You'll note that his wikipedia entry above made no mention of Torrens' Irish antecedents. Burton's remarks about the "Hibernian whoop" in his verses underlines it rather patronisingly ("plucky" seems a rather belitting epithet to apply to a fellow author, also). The curious thing is that Burton himself was often discriminated against as an Irishman by his intensely class and caste-conscious English contemporaries. Whilst he himself was born in Torquay, both of his parents were of Irish extraction.

Anyway, whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, here are the title-pages of Torrens' two principal publications. Fortunately both are readily available online as free e-texts:

Henry W. Torrens: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (1838)


1. Torrens, Henry. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: From the Arabic of the Aegyptian Ms. as edited by Wm Hay Macnaghten, Esqr., Done into English by Henry W. Torrens. Calcutta: W. Thacker & Co. / London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1838.




James Hume: A Selection from the Writings of the late Henry W. Torrens (1854)


2. Hume, James, ed. A Selection from the Writings, Prose and Poetical, of the late Henry W. Torrens, Esq., B.A., Bengal Civi Service, and of the Inner Temple; with a Biographical Memoir. 2 vols. Calcutta & London: R. C. Lepage & Co., 1854.

The editor of the second of these volumes explains that:

I have taken nearly all the poetry from the volume of the Arabian Nights ... because I found selection most difficult where all appeared good. The book is out of print, or nearly so I believe, and the severest critic will not blame me for preserving what otherwise might soon have been lost, or at any rate difficult to procure.

So who's correct? Did Torrens have any poetic talent or not? Burton (of course) had a tendency to play down the merits of any possible rivals. He himself has a reputation as a most execrable versifier (unlike his fellow Nights translator, John Payne).

William Harvey: The Ifrit and the Lady (1839)

Perhaps, then, you should judge for yourselves:

Then they both gave her rings from off their hands, and she said to them, "This Ufreet carried me off secretly on the night of my marriage, and put me into a coffer, and placed the coffer in a chest, and put on the chest seven strong locks, and laid me low in the midst of the roaring sea, the ever restless in the dashing of waves; yet he does not know that when a woman desires aught, there is nothing can prevail against her, as certain poets say.

"With confidence no women grace,
Nor trust an oath that's given by them;
Passion's the source and resting place,
Of anger and joy with them;
False love they show with lying face,
But ’neath the cloak all's guile with them;
In Yoosoof's story you may trace,
Some of the treacheries rife in them;
See ye not father Adam's case?
He was driven forth by cause of them.

Certain poets too have said,

“But alas! for you, who blame me
Fix the blamed one in his fault!
Is the sin with which you shame me,
Great and grievous as you call't?
Say, I be indeed a lover,
Have I done aught greater crime
Than in all men you discover,
Even from the olden time?
Ne'er at earthly thing I'll wonder,
Whatsoe'er the marvel be,
Till on one I chance to blunder
Scaped from woman's wile scot free."

The passage above comes from the frame-story to the Nights, where the two brothers Shahryar and Shahzaman, having executed their wives for adultery, are riding out to try and discover a virtuous woman. This one, even though she was abducted on her wedding night by a seemingly all-powerful Ifrit, has still managed to cuckold him more than 500 times.

Albert Letchford: The Ifrit and the Lady (1897)

Here's Burton's 1885 version of the same passage:

When they had drawn their two rings from their hands and given them to her, she said to them, "Of a truth this Ifrit bore me off on my bride-night, and put me into a casket and set the casket in a coffer and to the coffer he affixed seven strong padlocks of steel and deposited me on the deep bottom of the sea that raves, dashing and clashing with waves; and guarded me so that I might remain chaste and honest, quotha! that none save himself might have connexion with me. But I have lain under as many of my kind as I please, and this wretched Jinni wotteth not that Destiny may not be averted nor hindered by aught, and that whatso woman willeth the same she fulfilleth however man nilleth. Even so saith one of them:—

'Rely not on women;
Trust not to their hearts,
Whose joys and whose sorrows
Are hung to their parts!
Lying love they will swear thee
Whence guile ne'er departs:
Take Yusuf for sample
'Ware sleights and 'ware smarts!
Iblis ousted Adam
(See ye not?) thro' their arts.'

And another saith:—

'Stint thy blame, man! 'Twill drive to a passion without bound;
My fault is not so heavy as fault in it hast found.
If true lover I become, then to me there cometh not
Save what happened unto many in the by-gone stound.
For wonderful is he and right worthy of our praise
Who from wiles of female wits kept him safe and kept him sound.'"

John Tenniel: The Sleeping Genie and the Lady (1865)

And here's John Payne's (1882):

So each of them took off a ring and gave it to her. And she said to them, "Know that this genie carried me off on my wedding night and laid me in a box and shut the box up in a glass chest, on which he clapped seven strong locks and sank it to the bottom of the roaring stormy sea, knowing not that nothing can hinder a woman, when she desires aught, even as says one of the poets:

I rede thee put no Faith in womankind,
Nor trust the oaths they lavish all in vain:
For on the satisfaction of their lusts
Depend alike their love and their disdain.
They proffer lying love, but perfidy
Is all indeed their garments do contain.
Take warning, then, by Joseph's history,
And how a woman sought to do him bane;
And eke thy father Adam, by their fault
To leave the groves of Paradise was fain.

Or as another says:

Out on yon! blame confirms the blamed one in his way.
My fault is not so great indeed as you would say.
If I'm in love, forsooth, my case is but the same
As that of other men before me, many a day.
For great the wonder were if any man alive
From women and their wiles escape unharmed away!"

My 1001 Nights Project: The Ifrit and his Stolen Bride (tumblr)

So what do you think? I certainly think it would be difficult to claim that Torrens's version was any worse than either of the others. On the contrary, it's much easier to follow, and seems to mean much the same thing. As for Burton's accusation that the former's translation exemplified "the verbatim et literatim style," it's surely the case that both Payne and Burton make far greater efforts to follow the verbal and syntactical oddities of the original Arabic.

No doubt it's true that Torrens gave up on his project when he heard that Edward W. Lane was engaged in a not dissimiar work - not knowing, perhaps, how sadly bowdlerised the resulting translation would turn out to be. There's a curious echo, there, of Burton's discovery, fifty years later, that John Payne was embarked on the same project of a complete and literal translation of The Thousand Nights and One Night.

Unlike Torrens, though, Burton did not choose to step aside meekly. Instead he offered Payne priority of publication, but then went on to issue his own extensively annotated version a year later. The embarrassing similarities between large parts of the two translations has led to accusations of plagiarism on Burton's part. Whether or not this is true, even Burton admitted that when a previous scholar has hit on the perfect way to express something, it would be needless pedantry to insist on phrasing it differently. Make of that what you will.

It does seem possible that Burton was so scornful of Torrens because the latter resembled him in so many ways: the 'un-English' exuberance of manner, the gift for languages ... Unlike Torrens, though, Burton was sent down from Oxford without a degree, and managed to antagonise almost all of his well-wishers both in India and England.

Torrens, by contrast, managed to work harmoniously even with the eminent but eccentric William Hay Macnaghten, whose four-volume edition of the Arabic text of the 1001 Nights - the basis for his own translation - remains a monumental and irreplaceable work.

Wm H. Macnaghten, ed.: The Alif Laila, or Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (1839-42)

Of course, to anyone familiar with the history of nineteenth-century India, and particularly the ill-judged 1839 invasion of Afghanistan, Macnaghten is better known as the blundering political officer who was captured and killed by the Afghans in December 1841, shortly before the disastrous retreat from Kabul - generally thought to be among the worst military disasters in British history.

Macnaghten has a cameo role in the section devoted to the Afghanistan debacle in George MacDonald Fraser's irreverent but highly readable pisstake version of imperial history Flashman (1969), which purports to be the memoirs of the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays.

George MacDonald Fraser: Flashman (1839-42)

Interestingly enough, the city I live in, Auckland, is named after George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, Governor-General of India between 1836 and 1842, whose other great claim to fame is principal responsibility for the Afghanistan disaster.

My father could never walk past the toga'd statue of the great fool - originally erected in Calcutta in 1848, but donated to our city in 1969 - without shaking his fist and calling down curses upon his name.

The connections are all there, once you're ready to see them.

Lord Auckland (1848)

Christchurch Mosque Attack - First Anniversary

Jacinda Ardern projected on the Burj Khalifa (24 March 2019)

Christchurch, 15th March 2019

Du mußt dein Leben ändern
– Rainer Maria Rilke

Do we have to feel that pixilated head
burning behind our eyes?the media
keep broadcasting a manacled muscular
torso signalling triumph over the dead

his fingers cocked to a smirkthe score
perhapsJacinda Ardern’s face
caught in a rictus of grief
can’t quite displace
the bluntness of his semaphore

on this darkest of days it feels like our worst fears
were always justifiedour impotence
out in the open for all to seeour pain

trumped by the old familiar reptile brain
but scrolling down those flowers those faces those tears
I can’t see them as nothingaren’t they us?

[19/3/19]

Louvre: Louvre: Male Torso (4th-5th century BCE)

I thought that now might be the time to post this poem I wrote shortly after the terrible mosque shootings in Christchurch, exactly one year ago today. In form it's a very loose adaptation of Rainer Maria Rilke's great sonnet about Apollo. Something about that picture of the suspect in the dock reminded me of the statue Rilke was referring to - but in a very different way ...

Archaïscher Torso Apollos
Archaic Torso of Apollo

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
We never knew his unheard-of head
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
where the eyeballs ripened. But
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
his torso still glows like a candelabra
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,
in which his gaze, only half-illuminated

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
holds and dazzles. Otherwise the bow
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
of the breast wouldn’t join in, and the light twist
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
of the loins couldn’t lend a smile
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
to that centre, which holds fertility.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz
Otherwise this stone would be shut and cut short
unter der Shultern durchsichtigem Sturz
under the shoulders’ transparent fall
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;
and would not flicker like a predator’s skin;

und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
and would not burst out on all sides
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
like a star: since there’s no part
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
which doesn’t see you. You must change your life.

For more translations of Rilke's poem, you can check out the multiple versions collected here.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

The Garnett Family (2): In Defence of Constance

Meryl Streep makes herself up as Constance Garnett in The Idiots Karamazov (1975)

There's a fascinating passage in David Garnett's autobiography The Golden Echo (1953), where he describes how his mother set about her translations from the Russian:

Constance used to get up by half-past six or seven in the spring and summer, and we soon sat down to our breakfast of porridge, with milk for me and coffee for her. Her day contained so much that I cannot easily fit it all in. First thing in the morning she used to go round the garden, while the dew was still on the plants, and collect those miscreants, the slugs. This was a moment of self-indulgence, for the serious day's work was still before her. Some of the housework had to be done, then I was called in and my lessons started and, leaving me to work out a sum or to learn a proposition of Euclid, Constance would open the Russian volume which she was translating and begin work. Sometimes, but not always, I would work in the same room with her and, letting my pencil lie idle on the paper, I would watch the changing expressions on her face, eager, frowning, puzzled or amused. The Russian words were translated not only on the foolscap piece of paper in front of her, but into English features and flesh and blood. Her face was so expressive that I could guess at the emotional tension of what she was reading. Even if I did not interrupt, there would soon be a knocking at the back door, or Edward would come in with a letter in his hand, worried until he could read it to her and work off his irritation by a discussion. [53-54]

Given that she translated so much: the collected works of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Turgenev, together with substantial amounts of Tolstoy, Herzen and sundry others (NB: I've supplied a complete list at the end of this post), and that it's all now in the public domain, the merits of Constance Garnett's translations from the Russian continue to attract controversy.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)

Principal among her critics was Vladimir Nabokov, who described her versions as "dry and flat, and always unbearably demure." Poet Josef Brodsky went further, saying:

The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.

It's worth noting, however, that Nabokov also believed that the ideal translator should always be a man, and that his own translations - the four-volume Eugene Onegin, for instance - have hardly attracted universal acclaim.

Aleksandr Pushkin: Eugene Onegin, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (1964)

Was she inaccurate? At times, it seems, yes - especially at first. She began working on Russian in the mid-1890s and kept going until the 1930s. The jewel in her crown is undoubtedly her massive edition of Chekhov (17 volumes: 1916-26). It would be no exaggeration to compare the influence of this work to that of Scott-Moncrieff's pioneering versions of Proust (1922-30). It gifted the English-speaking world with an entirely new conception of the short story, just as Proust revolutionised contemporary notions of the novel.

David Remnick's 2005 New Yorker article "The Translation Wars" gives something of the atmosphere of that discovery:

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recounts scouring Sylvia Beach’s shelves for the Russians and finding in them a depth and accomplishment he had never known. Before that, he writes, he was told that Katherine Mansfield was “a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer,” but now, after reading Chekhov, she seemed to him like “near-beer.” To read the Russians, he said, “was like having a great treasure given to you”.

Close family friend D. H. Lawrence recalled her:

sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high — really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.

The inaccuracies have been exaggerated, too (often by rival translators, hoping to find a market for their own new version of some classic novel or other). Donald Rayfield, in his Chekhov Omnibus (1994):

compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov's stories and concluded: "While she makes elementary blunders, her care in unravelling difficult syntactical knots and her research on the right terms for Chekhov's many plants, birds and fish are impressive.... Her English is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable."

Feliks Volkhovsky (1846-1914)

That's not to say that accuracy is unimportant, but it's important to note that Garnett did not work alone. Taught Russian, initially, by Russian exile Feliks Volkhovsky (pictured above), she subsequently worked with his colleague Sergius Stepniak (below) on her first translations - of Goncharov and Tolstoy - both published in 1894.

Sergey Mikhaylovich Stepnyak-Kravchinsky (1851-1895)

Soon afterwards she made a trip to Russia - a journey described in loving detail in David Garnett's The Golden Echo. She met Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, but was forced to turn down his offer of more of his works to translate as she'd already made a start on her massive edition of Turgenev.

After Stepniak died in 1895, his wife Fanny worked with Garnett on her translations. From 1906 onwards, however, she was replaced by Natalie Duddington, daughter of esteemed Russian novelist Alexander Ivanovich Ertel, whom she met in Russia and in whom she found "real intellectual companionship" (as her grandson Richard Garnett reveals in his 1991 biography Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life, 251).

Natalie Duddington, trans.: Russian Folk Tales (1969)

Another important thing to remember about translation in general is that the texture of the translator's prose is probably more important in creating an impression on the reader than the actual literal accuracy of each phrase. The latest translation of a book is not necessarily the best. I recently had the experience of reading a new translation of Bulgakov's classic novel The Master and Margarita, which advertised itself as "complete and unexpurgated" - inlcluding numerous passages previously suppressed - and generally a great improvement on the earlier versions:

Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1940)

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. 1938. Trans. Michael Glenny. London: Collins Clear-Type Press / The Harvill Press, 1967.

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. 1929-40. Trans. Diana Burgin & Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Annotations and Afterword by Ellendea Proffer. 1995. Vintage International. New York: Random House, Inc., 1996.

It was virtually unreadable! So cloth-eared was the prose, so clunky the annotation, that if I hadn't already encountered the novel in Michael Glenny's smooth and delightful version, I would have concluded that Bulgakov was massively overrated!

Moreover, when Constance Garnett put out a translation, it fell instantly into the hands of the likes of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and the entire Bloomsbury set. Was her diction overly "demure," as Nabokov claims? Not in their eyes. And this was, arguably, the best period in history for stylish English prose.

As Rayfield comments above, and it's a point worth stressing: "Her English is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable." Constance Garnett is the closest thing we can get to a contemporary window on Chekhov - and the same applies to Tolstoy, too (though less so, admittedly, to Gogol and Dostoevsky, where her temperamental affinities are more strained).

Coming back to Hemingway, his verdict on the cumulative effect of those of her translations he read was as follows:

Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast (1964)

In Dostoevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoy. Tolstoy made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house.

That's not to say that new versions of these classic texts should not continue to appear. That would be quixotic in the extreme. But the credentials of the translators as prose writers need to be as impressive as their command of the language they're translating from. There's always a need for good, accurate cribs for students to use, but to compose a new version of a great book requires real literary skills. These don't come ready-made.

And neither is it always possible to trust the verdicts of native speakers of the translated language. Nabokov and Brodsky were no doubt correct in thinking that Garnett does not convey the true flavour of Dostoevsky, in particular. But could either of them have done better? English has its own rules, its own stylistic norms. If Nabokov's own work as a translator had been less perverse, less deliberately discordant, it might be easier to accept his views. Brodsky worked mainly as a translator of his own verse from Russian into English. Again, it is unfortunately far easier to discern the merits of that work in English translations by other hands, I'm sorry to say:

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)

Brodsky, Joseph. Selected Poems. Trans. George L. Kline. Foreword by W. H. Auden. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Brodsky, Joseph. Collected Poems in English: Poems Written in English and Poems Translated from the Original Russian by or with the Author. Ed. Ann Kjellberg. 2000. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

•

Lev Tolstoy (1897)

It was, I think, William Faulkner who said, when asked what were the three greatest novels of all time, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.

It may seem a bit presumptuous of me to question the judgement of Brodsky and Nabokov on the merits of Constance Garnett as a translator. Clearly, both as great Russian writers and as profoundly learned students of Russian literature in their own right, the competition is a somewhat unequal one.

I do feel strongly, though, that their strictures would apply just as much to more recent translations of these authors, and that what they are looking for - a kind of mirror of the genius of certain masters of the Russian language within the very different medium of English - is not really attainable in this world.

A brief experiment would therefore seem to be in order. I propose to take the famous opening passage of Tolstoy's great novel, and compare the different versions of it by various translators.

I hasten to say that my own Russian - a few memories of my schooldays, when it was taught to us as an "advanced" alternative to Latin - is rusty in the extreme. I can, however, read the language to some extent, so I'm not flying entirely blind:

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1878)

Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.

Все смешалось в доме Облонских. Жена узнала, что муж был в связи с бывшею в их доме француженкою-гувернанткой, и объявила мужу, что не может жить с ним в одном доме. Положение это продолжалось уже третий день и мучительно чувствовалось и самими супругами, и всеми членами семьи, и домочадцами. Все члены семьи и домочадцы чувствовали, что нет смысла в их сожительстве и что на каждом постоялом дворе случайно сошедшиеся люди более связаны между собой, чем они, члены семьи и домочадцы Облонских. Жена не выходила из своих комнат, мужа третий день не было дома. Дети бегали по всему дому, как потерянные; англичанка поссорилась с экономкой и написала записку приятельнице, прося приискать ей новое место; повар ушел вчера со двора, во время самого обеда; черная кухарка и кучер просили расчета.

- Russian text (1878)

•


Leo Tolstoy: Works, trans. Constance Garnett (6 vols: 1901-04)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarrelled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.

- Constance Garnett (1901)

•


Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (1970)

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Everything was upset in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered an intrigue between her husband and their former French governess, and declared that she would not continue to live under the same roof with him. This state of things had now lasted for three days, and not only the husband and wife but the rest of the family and the whole household suffered from it. They all felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that any group of people who had met together by chance at an inn would have had more in common than they. The wife kept to her own rooms, the husband stopped away from home all day; the children ran about all over the house uneasily; the English governess quarrelled with the housekeeper and wrote to a friend asking if she could find her another situation; the cook had gone out just at dinner-time the day before and had not returned; and the kitchen-maid and coachman had given notice.

- Louise and Aylmer Maude (1918)

•


Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenin, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (1978)

All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.

Everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household. The wife had found out about her husband' relationship with their former French governess and had announced that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This state of affairs had already continued for three days and was having a distressing effect on the couple themselves, on all the members of the family, and on the domestics. They all felt that there was no sense in their all living together under the same roof and that any group of people who chanced to meet at a wayside inn would have more in common than they, the members of the Oblonsky family, and their servants. The wife did not leave her own rooms and the husband stayed away from home all day. The children strayed all over the house, not knowing what to do with themselves. The English governess had quarrelled with the housekeeper and had written a note asking a friend to find her a new place. The head-cook had gone out right at dinner-time the day before. The under-cook and the coachman had given notice.

- Rosemary Edmonds (1954)

•

Let's take, first, that most famous of opening sentences for a novel (alongside, perhaps, 'Call me Ishmael" and 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"). The Russian reads:

Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.

Vsye schastliviye syem'i pokhozhu drug na drug, kazhdaya nyeschastlivaya syem'ya nyeschastlivaya po-svoyemu.

[All happy families resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way]

One would have to admit that the Maudes are somewhat more literal in their observance of the exact order of words in the Russian sentence. Garnett's slightly rearranged version does sound rather more epigrammatic in English, however. There's not a lot in it. The meaning of the sentence is not really in doubt in any of them. Edmonds is admirably concise.

Все смешалось в доме Облонских.

Vsye smyeshalos' v domye Oblonskikh.

[Everything was mixed-up / topsy-turvy in the house of the Oblonskys]

Жена узнала, что муж был в связи с бывшею в их доме француженкою-гувернанткой, и объявила мужу, что не может жить с ним в одном доме.

Zhyena uznala, chto muzh byl v svyazi s byvsheyu v ikh domye frantsuzhyenkoyu-guvernantkoy, i ob"yavila muzhu, chto nye mozhyet zhit' s nim v odnom domye

[The wife had learned that her husband was in connection with the former French governess in their house, and had told her husband that she could not live together with him in the same house.]

Положение это продолжалось уже третий день и мучительно чувствовалось и самими супругами, и всеми членами семьи, и домочадцами.

Polozhyeniye eto prodolzhalos' uzhye tryetiy den' i muchityel'no chuvstvovalos' i samimi suprugami, i vsyemi chlyenami sem'i, i domochadtsami.

[This situation was continuing for the third day, and was painfully felt both by the spouses themselves, as well as all members of the family and the household.]

Все члены семьи и домочадцы чувствовали, что нет смысла в их сожительстве и что на каждом постоялом дворе случайно сошедшиеся люди более связаны между собой, чем они, члены семьи и домочадцы Облонских.

Vse chlyeny syem'i i domochadtsy chuvstvovali, chto nyet smysla v ikh sozhityel'stve i chto na kazhdom postoyalom dvorye sluchayno soshyedshiyesya lyudi boleye svyazany myezhdu soboy, chyem oni, chlyeny syem'i i domochadtsy Oblonskikh.

[All members of the family and the household felt that there was no point in their living together, and that at any inn, the people who happened to come together were more connected with one another than they, the members of the Oblonsky family and household.]

Жена не выходила из своих комнат, мужа третий день не было дома. Дети бегали по всему дому, как потерянные; англичанка поссорилась с экономкой и написала записку приятельнице, прося приискать ей новое место; повар ушел вчера со двора, во время самого обеда; черная кухарка и кучер просили расчета.

Zhyena ne vykhodila iz svoikh komnat, muzha tryetiy dyen' ne bylo doma. Dyeti byegali po vsyemu domu, kak poteryannyye; anglichanka possorilas' s ekonomkoy i napisala zapisku priyatel'nitse, prosya priiskat' yey novoye mesto; povar ushyel vchyera so dvora, vo vryemya samogo obyeda; chyernaya kukharka i kucher prosili raschyeta.

[The wife did not leave her rooms; the husband was not at home for the third day. Children ran all over the house like lost souls; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper and wrote a note to a friend, asking her to find her a new place; the cook had left the day before during the dinner service; the kitchenmaid and the coachman had asked for their wages.]

There are no very important divergences in meaning in any of these three translations. How could there be? The latter two had the advantage of Garnett's translation to guide them, but all were competent Russian scholars, perfectly capable of understanding the surface meaning and the underlying nuances of Tolstoy's wonderfully balanced prose.

You can see from the literal version above, though, that differences of idiom between the two languages make it difficult to preserve the insistent repetitions of such phrases as "vsyemi chlyenami sem'i" [all members of the family] and "domochadtsami" [household staff]. With the best will in the world, something is lost here in translation between Russian and English.

But does it matter? The Maudes certainly make a virtue of being less "free" than Garnett is in her transpositions and remodellings of the passage to sound like good English prose. In keeping with the ethos of the Penguin Classics, Edmonds tries to make the language of her translation sound as unpretentious and contemporary as possible - though given that there's now more distance between us and her (65 years) than there was between her and Constance Garnett (53 years), it's hard now to detect that much difference between them.

If you're a student of Russian needing a crib, I suspect that the Maudes would suit your purposes best. For sheer ease of reading, Edmonds is hard to beat (I once read most of her translation of War and Peace on an eighteen-hour plane flight, so I know what I'm talking about). Why do we still need Constance Garnett, then? Distinguished Slavonic scholar and teacher Gary Saul Morson summed it all up rather nicely when he wrote, in 1997:

I love Constance Garnett, and wish I had a framed picture of her on my wall, since I have often thought that what I do for a living is teach the Collected Works of Constance Garnett. She has a fine sense of English, and, especially, the sort of English that appears in British fiction of the realist period, which makes her ideal for translating the Russian masterpieces. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were constantly reading and learning from Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and others. Every time someone else redoes one of these works, reviewers say that the new version replaces Garnett; and then another version comes out, which, apparently, replaces Garnett again, and so on. She must have done something right.

Quite so. Garnett brings with her a flavour of a classic era in English prose, and given her much greater proximity to the golden age of Russian prose, you discard what she brings to the table at your peril.

Perhaps it would be easiest to say, then, that you need never feel ashamed of concentrating most of your attention on Constance Garnett's translations of the great Russian prose writers. Would we had anyone capable of performing such a feat for the great Russian poets - Pushkin in particular - whose merits will have to continue to be taken on trust by English readers.

•

Constance Garnett (1861-1946)

Constance Clara Garnett (née Black):
A Chronological Bibliography

Constance Garnett's wikipedia page lists her as having published 71 volumes of Russian literature in translation, which also happens to be the total I've reached below. David Remnick's 2005 New Yorker article The Translation Wars gives the total as 70 (presumably by subtracting the collection by Maxim Gorky, only partially translated by Garnett).

The bibliography on pp.207-8 of Carolyn Heilbrun's The Garnett Family (1961) includes one additional book, Madame Lenev's Folk Songs of Great Russia, translated by Garnett, but published privately on an unspecified date.

Perhaps this is why Edna O'Brien's 2011 review of the reissue of Richard Garnett's 1991 biography Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life revises the total up to 73. How that number could otherwise have been arrived at, I'm not really sure.

In any case, the list below is as complete as I can make it. I've combined information from my own collection with the online listings here, as well as the dates and publication details given by Heilbrun (op. cit.).

•

[in chronological order]:



Ivan Goncharov: A Common Story (1894)


Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891)

[1 vol: 1894]

1. Gontcharoff, Ivan. A Common Story. 1847. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1894.




Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace (3 vols)


Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)

[8 vols: 1894-1922]

2. Tolstoy, Leo. The Kingdom of God is Within You. 1894. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1894.


3. Tolstoy, Count Leo. Anna Karenin: A Novel. 1877. Trans. Constance Garnett. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1901.


4. Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and Other Stories. 1886. Trans. Constance Garnett (1902)


5. Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. 1869. Trans. Constance Garnett. 3 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1904.


6. Tolstoy, Leo. Christianity and Patriotism. 1895. Trans. Constance Garnett (1922)




Ivan Turgenev: The Torrents of Spring (1897)


Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883)

[18 vols: 1894-1934]

7. Turgenev, Ivan. Rudin. 1857. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 1. London: William Heinemann, 1894.


8. Turgenev, Ivan. A House of Gentlefolk. 1859. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 2. London: William Heinemann, 1894.


9. Turgenev, Ivan. On the Eve: a Novel. 1860. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 3. London: William Heinemann, 1895.


10. Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Children: A Novel. 1862. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 4. London: William Heinemann, 1895.


11. Turgenev, Ivan. Smoke. 1867. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 5. London: William Heinemann, 1896.


12. Turgenev, Ivan. Virgin Soil. 1877. Trans. Constance Garnett. 2 vols. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 6-7. London: William Heinemann, 1896.


13. Turgenev, Ivan. A Sportsman’s Sketches. 1852. Trans. Constance Garnett. 2 vols. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 8-9. London: William Heinemann, 1895.


14. Turgenev, Ivan. Dream Tales and Prose Poems. 1882. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 10. London: William Heinemann, 1897.


15. Turgenev, Ivan. The Torrents of Spring, etc. 1872. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 11. London: William Heinemann, 1897.


16. Turgenev, Ivan. A Lear of the Steppes, etc. 1870. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 12. London: William Heinemann, 1898.


17. Turgenev, Ivan. The Diary of a Superfluous Man, etc. 1850. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 13. London: William Heinemann, 1899.


18. Turgenev, Ivan. A Desperate Character, etc. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 14. London: William Heinemann, 1899.


19. Turgenev, Ivan. The Jew, etc. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 15. London: William Heinemann, 1899.


20. Turgenev, Ivan. The Two Friends and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 16. London: William Heinemann, 1921.


21. Turgenev, Ivan. Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 17. London: William Heinemann, 1922.


22. Turgenev, Ivan. Three Famous Plays: A Month in the Country; A Provincial Lady; A Poor Gentleman. 1850, 1851, 1841. Trans. Constance Garnett. Introduction by David Garnett. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd. / New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934.




Alexander Ostrovsky: The Storm (1899)


Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky (1823-1886)

[1 vol: 1899]

23. Ostrovsky, Alexander. The Storm. 1859. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Duckworth, 1899.




Maxim Gorky: Twenty-Six Men and a Girl (1902)


Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)

[1 vol: 1902]

24. Gorky, Maxim. 'Chelkash,' in Twenty-Six Men and a Girl. 1899. Trans. Constance Garnett et al. London: Duckworth, 1902.




Constantine Feldmann: The Revolt of the "Potemkin" (1908)


Constantine Feldmann (?-d.1937)

[1 vol: 1908]

25. Feldmann, Constantine. The Revolt of the "Potemkin". 1908. Trans. Constance Garnett (1908)




Constance Garnett, trans.: Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (12 vols)


Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)

[12 vols: 1912-20]

26. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. 1881. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 1 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1912.


27. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. 1869. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 2 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1913.


28. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Possessed. 1872. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 3 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.


29. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. 1866. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 4 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.


30. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The House of the Dead. 1862. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 5 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1915.


31. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Insulted and Injured. 1861. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 6 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1915.


32. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. A Raw Youth. 1875. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1916. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 7 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1916.


33. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Eternal Husband, and Other Stories: The Double / A Gentle Spirit. 1870, 1846 & 1876. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 8 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1917.


34. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Gambler, and Other Stories: Poor People / The Landlady. 1867, 1846 & 1847. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 9 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.


35. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. White Nights, and Other Stories: Notes from Underground / A Faint Heart / A Christmas Tree and a Wedding / Polzunkov / A Little Hero / Mr. Prokhartchin. 1848, 1864, 1848, 1848, 1848, 1849 & 1846. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 10 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1918.


36. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. An Honest Thief, and Other Stories: Uncle’s Dream / A Novel in Nine Letters / An Unpleasant Predicament / Another Man’s Wife / The Heavenly Christmas Tree / The Peasant Marey / The Crocodile / Bobok / The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. 1848, 1859, 1847, 1862, 1848, 1876, 1876, 1865, 1873 & 1877. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1919. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 11 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1919.


37. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Friend of the Family, and Other Stories: Nyetochka Nyezvanov. 1859 & 1849. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1920. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 12 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1920.




Anton Tchehov: The Witch and Other Stories (1918)


Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904)

[17 vols: 1916-26]

38. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. I: The Darling and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. Introduction by Edward Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1916.


39. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. II: The Duel and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1916.


40. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. III: The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1917.


41. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. IV: The Party and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1917.


42. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. V: The Wife and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1918.


43. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. VI: The Witch and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1918.


44. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. VII: The Bishop and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1919.


45. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. VIII: The Chorus Girl and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.


46. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. IX: The Schoolmistress and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.


47. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. X: The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1921.


48. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. XI: The Schoolmaster and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1921.


49. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. XII: The Cook’s Wedding and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922.


50. Tchehov, Anton. The Tales of Tchehov, Vol. XIII: Love and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922.


51. Tchehov, Anton. The Plays of Tchehov, Vol. I: The Cherry Orchard and Other Plays. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.


52. Tchehov, Anton. The Plays of Tchehov, Vol. II: Three Sisters and Other Plays. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.


53. Garnett, Constance, trans. Letters of Anton Tchehov to His Family and Friends. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.


54. Garnett, Constance, trans. Letters of Anton Tchehov to Olga Leonardovna Knipper. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926.




The Works of Nikolay Gogol


Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852)

[6 vols: 1922-28]

55. Gogol, Nikolay. Dead Souls. 1842. Trans. Constance Garnett. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922.


56. Gogol, Nikolay. The Overcoat and Other Stories. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.


57. Gogol, Nikolay. Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926.


58. Gogol, Nikolay. The Government Inspector and Other Plays. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926.


59. Gogol, Nikolay. Mirgorod. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1928.




Alexander Herzen: My Past and Thoughts (vol. iii)


Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870)

[6 vols: 1924-26]

60. Herzen, Alexander. My Past and Thoughts, 6 vols. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: Chatto & Windus, 1924-1926.



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[in alphabetical order]:

Chekhov (1916-26): 17 vols
Dostoyevsky (1912-20): 12 vols
Feldmann (1908): 1 vol
Gogol (1922-28): 6 vols
Goncharov (1894): 1 vol
Gorky (1902): 1 vol
Herzen (1924-26): 6 vols
Ostrovsky (1899): 1 vol
Tolstoy (1894-1922): 8 vols
Turgenev (1894-1934): 18 vols

= 71 volumes in all


Osip Braz: Portrait of Anton Chekhov (1898)

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