The Idiot Read Free

plot: Dumas’s The Lady with Camellias (in the petit jeu, or game of ‘forfeits’ at Nastasya Filippovna’s birthday soiree), Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (in the scene where Myshkin and Rogozhin sit beside the corpse of Nastasya Filippovna), and Hugo’s The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death (in Myshkin’s description of the execution he watched in France). In addition, the structure of the novel, and its setting in an environment that is very different from that of its predecessor, Crime and Punishment - the high society salons and houses of St Petersburg - show affinities with the structure and setting of novels by Georges Sand, whose work Dostoyevsky had read and admired.
    It may, therefore, be plain that the challenges posed to the English translator by a novel like The Idiot are of a different nature from those present in other works of Dostoyevsky, in particular the novel Crime and Punishment, with its, to some extent, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ literary background and precedents. For one thing, the ‘Frenchness’ of The Idiot is difficult to render in English. In the dialogue, Dostoyevsky often has a habit of inserting Russified French words into the text: petizhyo (petit jeu), prues (prouesse), afishevanye (from Fr. afficher), frappiro van (from Fr. frapper), konsekventnyi (from Fr. conséquent) and so on, and this effect is heightened by a peppering of phrases that either mimic French constructions or are directly written in French. For another, the characters speak in formal styles, which are sometimes, as in the case of the Yepanchin family, those of the French-educated upper middle class, but are also - as in the case of Lebedev and Rogozhin - urban idioms that have ceased to exist in contemporary Russian and cannot be easily transposed into another language. Lebedev speaks a Russian that lies somewhere between the lingo of nineteenth-century petty civil servants and the rhetoric of religious sects such as the Old Believers. Rogozhin’s speech is derived from, among other things, that of nineteenth-century Russian merchants. To attempt to put it into English as ‘Cockney’ or Dickensian substandard English is to miss its essence, for it, too, is a formal style of speech, with its own special - and sometimes even ‘specialist’ - vocabulary, grammar and syntax.
    A further challenge to the task of translation is represented by the presence in the novel of a fictional narrator, a device that is also a feature of other novels of Dostoyevsky, in particular The Brothers Karamazov. In The Idiot, the narrator, when present, writes in a style which the author deliberately intends to be clumsy, and even comical at times - laborious, pedantic and unconsciously self-contradictory, the chronicles of an untalented local newspaper journalist in charge of society columns of his publication. This fictional narrator moves in and out of the novel - it is not always absolutely clear where his contributions begin and end, or exactly where Dostoyevsky takes over. This tongue-in-cheek element of burlesque in the writing is hard to catch in translation, but I have attempted it, and the reader must judge the degree of my success.
    Amidst the polyphonic richness of the text, I have mostly opted for maximum comprehensibility, while remaining as close to the original Russian as possible. The reader should not forget, however, that to Russians Dostoyevsky’s prose can seem strange and even perverse at times, while none the less possessing an almost magical quality. It is, I believe, the translator’s task to preserve the nervous, electric flow of the writing, while still preserving the idiosyncrasies of the author’s style - from the repetition of words like ‘even’ and ‘again’, which crop up with disconcerting frequency in many of the sentences, to the more extended repetitions which are also Dostoyevsky’s hallmarks. Also, the sheer oddity of some of the dialogue cannot really be disguised without betraying the author’s