Dr Johnson’s dictum – that the only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it – is, in my view, particularly applicable to the novel. In such an approach therefore it is the entertainment value of a work which becomes the principal measure of quality. To apply this to Dostoevsky, who has traditionally been judged by other criteria, is to turn him on his head. And not before time! Dostoevsky needs to be reassessed, and reassessed radically. Up to the present he has been lauded almost exclusively for his major works. His earlier, shorter novels, on the other hand, have been woefully neglected. The loss has been both his and the reading public’s. By the new standard that I am now applying, Humiliated and Insulted becomes his all-time number one, then follow The Double, The Village of Stepanchikovo and The Gambler, not necessarily in that order. My predilection for Humiliated and Insulted is by a narrow margin; what is most important, however, is that these works, between them, provide me with all the arguments I need to make my case; they show the author as an unrivalled storyteller pure and simple who drives on in headlong outpourings of extreme emotion and passion, untrammelled by the mind-bending complexities that are such a feature of his later novels. To many critics, and readers, those complexities and labyrinthine philosophical speculations have been a decided deterrent, as has the sheer size of the resulting tomes. Brevity is the soul of wit. However, my enthusiasm for Dostoevsky-lite does not mean I am siding with the relatively small but highly eminent coterie of his detractors. For me it is simply the case that if Dostoevsky had written those four novels and nothing else, his lasting fame would still have been assured.
Now it’s all very well my waxing lyrical over my recommendations, but I cannot ignore the fact that not a single word of the text (foreign quotations apart) that the translator presents to the reader has been written by the original author himself. The American translator and academic Michael R. Katz said that for the authentic experience the reader is advised and urged to learn the language himself. I would quarrel in one respect only. The translation has to be the authentic experience. It, and not the original, becomes the original – the de facto original. Indeed there is no reason why the translation cannot surpass the original. Interestingly, Goethe preferred to read his own Faust in French, and he of all people had a choice. He even chose to give his reason in French: “En allemand je ne peux lire le Faust, mais dans cette traduction française chaque trait me frappe comme s’il était tout nouveau pour moi. (“I cannot read Faust in German, but in this French translation every feature strikes me as if it were entirely new to me.”) The translator in question was Gérard de Nerval. It is also said that the French translation of The Life of Jesus by the German theologian David Strauss sold more copies in Germany than in France.
The popularity of Humiliated and Insulted among present-day Russian readers is impressively high. Why then is it virtually unknown to the English-speaking world, which might have been expected to warm precisely to this kind of intricately constructed tale of passion and woe with a plot line that is rich in all the ingredients of modern best-selling fiction? The explanation might lie in the nature of the previous translations. I know of only three: the first by Frederick Whishaw (Injury and Insult, 1887); the second by the legendary Constance Garnett (The Insulted and Injured, 1915); and the third by Olga Shartse published in the Soviet Union in 1957 (The Insulted and Humiliated). The first two are currently out of print and the third available only at specialized outlets. The present attempt to recreate Dostoevsky’s original in English is in the translator’s mind an exercise in revealing to a new and wider readership a hitherto much neglected masterpiece. It will stand or – as did the previous translations – fall in the attempt.
The vast majority of recreational readers operate in one language only. They have no choice but to read foreign literature in translation, but I hope that like Goethe with his Faust, bilingual people, and even native speakers too with a command of English, will pick up this rendering of Dostoevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted as worthy of attention per se. As a former language teacher, I would particularly encourage language students to read their own literature in translation. Overriding everything, however, as Robert Burton points out in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, written many centuries ago on the theme of the tenuousness of literary success and popularity, indeed of literary survival itself: “pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli” (“the fate of books depends on the fancy of the reader”).
In conclusion a word about my own style in relation to Dostoevsky’s. It could be summed up in what one South American author said to his translator: “Translate not what I said, but what I was trying to say!” This would necessarily imply that the norms of the target language are paramount. What about the “warts and all” principle? Only as far as it goes. There are warts and warts – native speaker’s mistakes and a foreigner’s. The two are like chalk and cheese! “With Dostoevsky one can be pardoned for thinking one has walked into a lunatic asylum, but never into a museum of waxworks.” The translator therefore has to be careful not to give the reader the impression that the lunatics are just foreigners communicating in a peculiar brand of English.