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ABSTRACT
This article explores the role of translation of medieval and religious literature in Fedor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In the chapters “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor”, Ivan Karamazov weaves two hagiographies, an apocryphal legend, and a passage from the Psalms used in the liturgy into the fabric of his argumentation with his brother Alesha. Ivan would have read most of these works in Church Slavonic, yet he quotes them in his own, contemporary Russian language. This study shows that, whereas Ivan’s references to Rus’ian literature are permeated by inaccurate assumptions current at his time, many of his misrepresentations are deliberate. Rather than leaning on careful readings of his sources, Ivan’s transpositions are an exercise in creative freedom that reveals the tension between his intellectual and religious convictions, and challenges the limits of text-centred definitions of translation.
Acknowledgments
This article owes its existence to the conference “Worlds of The Brothers Karamazov” organized by Yuri Corrigan as part of the “Big Fat Books” series run by the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. My special thanks go to Robin Feuer Miller for her suggestions at the time of my presentation and later when she read a draft of this article. I would also like to thank Olga Strakhova, who not only discussed the interpretations of the Greek passage with me but also pointed me to materials that proved very useful for my analysis. Thanks are also due to the two anonymous evaluators of this article for their careful reading and useful feedback. Needless to say, any remaining shortcomings are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Inés Garcia de la Puente is currently working on practices of translation in pre-Mongol Rus’. She is the author of an academic translation into Spanish of the Primary Chronicle, the oldest annals of the East Slavs. She has also researched contemporary translingual literature and autobiographical self-translation. She teaches at Boston University.
Notes
1 Vetlovskaia explains this in the endnote to page 266 of Brat’ia Karamazovy (see Dostoevskii Citation1991, 662–663). She is responsible for all the endnotes to the novel. Quotations in Russian from The Brothers Karamazov in this article are taken from this edition and referred to as Dostoevskii Citation1991.
2 Here and elsewhere, my use of the concepts of “rewriting”, “refraction” and “manipulation” follows André Lefevere’s (Citation1992, 1–8) ideas on translation as cultural appropriation. However, whereas Lefevere’s systemic approach focuses strongly on culture and institutions, I apply them to the actions of one individual, Ivan, in conversation with another, Alesha.
3 Pevear and Volokhonsky choose to translate the title of the legend as The Mother of God Visits the Torments. Throughout this article I will, however, refer to it as The Wanderings of the Mother of God Through Hell (abbreviated as Wanderings), which conveys the wording of the Russian title more closely.
4 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from The Brothers Karamazov in English are from Dostoevsky [Citation1990] Citation2002.
5 Vetlovskaia provides detailed information about the sources for the Wanderings available to Dostoevsky at the time of writing The Brothers Karamazov. She hesitantly concludes that he might have taken all existing versions into consideration (Citation1974, 298–300; see also Vetlovskaia Citation2007, 273–275). On the contrary, Perlina (Citation1985, 82) is adamant that Dostoevsky’s and Ivan’s source was Tikhonravov’s edition. I agree with Vetlovskaia that the edition that Dostoevsky may have used is impossible to determine with certainty; moreover, besides written editions, he could also have been familiar with oral versions of the legend.
6 Pypin quotes a passage that mentions sinners suffering in a river of fire, but there is no trace of the sentence that refers to God forgetting the sinners who disappear under the burning waters (Citation1857, 351). That sentence is extant in the other two versions of the Wanderings that I mention in the following lines.
7 Sreznevskii (Citation1863, 204) notes that he used the East Slavonic version of the Wanderings edited by Pypin and published by Kushelev-Bezborodko in 1862 (Pamiatniki starinnoi russkoi literatury, vol. 3) and the Greek version previously published by Destupis.
8 By East Slavonic I refer to the written language of Rus’, which was initially a brand of Church Slavonic with local phonetic and eventually lexical traits of the Rus’ian or East Slavic speakers. Church Slavonic is used as an umbrella designation of the religious written language of Slavic peoples in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. I am well aware that there is some unavoidable arbitrariness in my use of these terms; for more linguistic and historical details, see e.g. Lunt Citation1988/Citation1989 and Citation1987.
9 The original Greek text of the Wanderings predates it by over half a millennium, as it was probably written around the fourth or fifth centuries. See Rozhdestvenskaia Citation1999.
10 See Müller (Citation1961, 27–28). Given the ambiguity of the terms Slavonic, Old Church Slavonic and South Slavonic, Müller’s statement may need a brief explanation. He draws exclusively on Tikhonravov when he states that the origins of the translation are South Slavic. When Tikhonravov refers to the text of Wanderings in the Trinity-Sergius Monastery manuscript, that is, in the earliest surviving Rus’ian manuscript, he uses the term “Slavonic” translation (Tikhonravov Citation1898, 59 [notes 7 and 8]). Given that the first translations from the Greek into a Slavonic language were done in South Slavic territory, “Slavonic” is often used as a synonym of “South Slavonic” in specialized bibliography (Lunt Citation1987, 134). Therefore, Müller is coherent with Tikhonravov’s terminology when he infers that the Slavonic twelfth-century Rus’ian Wanderings had been translated from the Greek in South Slavic territory before it was transported to Rus’.
11 Karamzin Citation1988, book 2, chapter 2, col. 15–16. Karamzin’s statement leaned on a problematic passage of the earliest Rus’ian chronicle, yet he succeeded in creating a flattering picture of Yaroslav’s reign that was rarely contested not only in Dostoevsky’s time, but also in Soviet-era history books. Lunt (Citation1988) criticizes Karamzin and many others for this – from Lunt’s point of view, incorrect – assumption.
12 I must note, however, that in his study of the Wanderings, Pypin (Citation1857, 351) had dated the Trinity-Sergius manuscript to the fourteenth century. This dating would seem to provide a justification for Ivan’s statement that Russian monks composed and translated in Tatar-Mongol times. However, as I mentioned above, it is unlikely that Ivan knew about the Wanderings only through Pypin’s (Citation1857) study; in fact, it is hard to say if he knew it at all.
13 Literary achievements (and this includes translations) in Rus’ became a politicized question in the nineteenth century. Slavophiles defended intense book-learning activity, whereas Westernizers underlined the lack of literary culture in Rus’. Consequently, the first group would advocate in favour of finding the future of Russia in its own, native tradition, and the second group would look at the examples of the Western tradition (see Podskalsky Citation1982, 73).
14 On why Ivan mentions a lake and not a river, see Oenning Thompson (Citation1991, 116–117), Vetlovskaia (Citation1998, 37), and Miller (Citation2012, 280).
15 For scholars who have noted this before, see Vetlovskaia (Citation1998, 35) and Miller (Citation2012, 271).
16 The role of Mary as suffering mother and intercessor for sinners originated in Byzantium, but in Rus’ and its heir states it became deeply rooted. On her role as mater dolorosa and intercessor in the Wanderings through the lens of The Brothers Karamazov, see Vetlovskaia (Citation1998, 35–47).
17 On enopion and its use in the Septuagint and in Ptolemaic papyri, see Sollamo (Citationno date, 777–779).
18 Given the apocryphal nature of the legend, the Greek New Testament, and especially The Apocalypse of St. John, provide a closer reference for the Wanderings. Examples of enopion tou theou appear e.g. in Evangelium secundum Lucam, ch. 1, section 19, line 3; Acta apostolorum, ch. 4, section 19, line 4; Epistula Pauli ad Romanos, ch. 14, section 22, line 2; Apocalypsis Joannis, ch. 3 section 3, line 2; ch. 8, section 2, line 2; ch. 8, section 4, line 2. See the Greek text of the citations in Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.
19 For example, all of the New Testament passages above read предъ Богомъ in OCS.
20 Lefevere (Citation2012, 205) defines refraction as “the adaptation of a work of literature to a different audience, with the intention of influencing the way in which that audience reads the work”.
21 Miller notes that Ivan seems to be struck by the language of the legend rather than by its theological and philosophical meaning (Citation2012, 268). She also points to the contrast between Ivan’s blunt expression “these God forgets” and the much more ambiguous wording of the Wanderings (268–269). Our research and treatment of Ivan’s discourse, however, go in different directions.
22 Psalm 117 of the Eastern Orthodox Bible corresponds to Psalm 118 in the Protestant version. The difference originates in translation: the Orthodox Psalms are translated from the Greek, and the Protestant from the Hebrew. A useful online bilingual version CS-Russian can be found here: http://wiki.orthodic.org/Псалом_117 (accessed March 15, 2019).
23 In some English renderings that ambiguity disappears. Here are Ivan’s words in three different translations: “And for countless ages mankind prayed with fiery faith, ‘Oh Lord our God, appear unto us’” (Dostoevsky Citation[1958] 1982, 290); “And for so many centuries mankind had been pleading with faith and fire: ‘God our Lord, reveal thyself to us’” (Dostoevsky Citation[1990] 2002, 248); “And so many ages mankind had prayed with faith and fervor. ‘O Lord our God, hasten Thy coming’” (Dostoevsky Citation2011, 215). The three translations render Ivan’s imperative as such, thus transmitting the meaning that Ivan intended for the verb. However, they “correct” Ivan’s mistake in the vocative that opens the quotation. Where Ivan says bo Gospodi, they reinstate the “g” that was missing to the end of bo and so the two nouns, bog and gospod (“God” and “Lord”) reappear in a double vocative in the English versions. The opening now reads smoothly because the conjunction introduced by Ivan, bo (“since”), which obscured the sense of the sentence, disappears. Yet by doing this, the translators go back to the original Bible verse, not to Ivan’s words.
24 See Dostoevskii (Citation1991, 670; footnote 279).
25 See especially Dostoevsky ([Citation1990] Citation2002, 243–244).
26 Many reference works on translation insist on the importance of the written text. For example, Bassnett defines translation as “a textual process that involves encounters between languages” (Citation2014, 173) and House states that “[t]ranslation can be defined as the result of a linguistic-textual operation in which a text in one language is re-produced in another language” (Citation2014, 1).