Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac by Julia Titus (review)

Reviewed by: Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac by Julia Titus Muireann Maguire Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac. By Julia Titus. Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press. 2022. xxiv+132pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–64469–779–5. Almost forty years before the publication of Julia Titus's intriguing book, the British scholar Donald Rayfield published an article entitled 'Dostoyevsky's Eugénie Grandet' (Forum for Modern Language Studies, 20.2(April 1984), 133–42). Rayfield identified the 1844 connection between Dostoevsky and Balzac—when the young Russian writer translated the lionized French novelist's first successful novel, Eugénie Grandet (1833), for the Russian journal Repertuar i panteon—as the 'one missing brick in the edifice of Dostoyevsky studies' (p. 133). That edifice has now been fully repointed, thanks to Titus's detailed comparative exploration of what ensued when one of the most significant writers of the nineteenth century translated another. Oddly enough, Rayfield's article, possibly the only previous English-language scholarly work on the same topic, is omitted from Titus's bibliography. Instead, she draws on the usual suspects—Dostoevsky scholarship by Joseph Frank and Leonid Grossman, broader literary criticism by Harold Bloom and Peter Brooks (among others), and a useful spectrum of Translation Studies perspectives, including works by Emily Apter, Brian Baer, and Lawrence Venuti. Titus uses Venuti's well-known dichotomy of 'foreignizing' and 'domesticating' translators to identify Dostoevsky firmly as a member of the latter cohort, one who makes the foreign text as Russian End Page 289 as possible. (This will hardly surprise anyone familiar with Dostoevsky's nationalist views; even here, in his first published work, they are inchoate.) Her monograph is based on close comparative reading of Dostoevsky's Russian translation (long since superseded by two twentieth-century versions) against Balzac's original, using extracts from each as a basis for assessing Balzac's lasting influence on Dostoevskian thematics. In her Introduction, Titus provides context for Dostoevsky's translatorial foray: in the early 1840s both he and his elder brother Mikhail were enthusiastically engaged in translating their favourite European novelists into Russian. None of this information is new to scholars, but nor has it ever been so lucidly and concisely presented. Mikhail translated and published two major plays by their idol Schiller, but apart from Evgenia Grande (as he Russianized the title), none of Dostoevsky's other efforts was successful. He abandoned work on Eugène Sue's Mathilde: mémoires d'une jeune femme (1841), and although he completed a version of George Sand's La Dernière Aldini (1838), he was unluckily pre-empted in publication by another translator. Titus shows how translation reappears as a theme in several of Dostoevsky's later novels, most famously in Crime and Punishment as the resourceful Razumikhin's side hustle. She demonstrates how Balzac's aesthetics and characterization penetrated numerous early novels by Dostoevsky; her argument that Crime and Punishment was enhanced by elements from Eugénie Grandet (from the bleakness of Raskolnikov's garret room to Sonia's spiritual beauty) is both insightful and original. Her discussion of numerous short extracts from Dostoevsky's (idiosyncratically flawed) translation reveals its omissions and arbitrary reformulations, while explaining perceptively how the younger writer's divergences from Balzac indicate aesthetic and philosophical independence rather than carelessness. (This is not universally true, as she concedes: Rayfield has noted how the young Dostoevsky clearly lacked interest in plants or nature, decimating Balzac's descriptions of both; he even missed the erotic symbolism of maidenhair fern and flowering stonecrop, which he turned into ivy.) Titus's primary focus is on how the themes of Balzac's novel were reflected in Dostoevsky's later writing. In the lauded French realist, Dostoevsky recognized an aesthetic affinity which would later influence and enhance his own stylistic and narrative designs, not least their shared focus on 'the human soul at the moments of greatest emotional turmoil' (p. xxiii). Titus selects three themes for exploration in individual chapters: the portrayal of women (the titular Eugénie reappears in several of Dostoevsky's later female characters); the depiction of the material world (including households, the physiology of faces, especially ugly ones, and the semiotics...