Many years ago, Donald Rayfield suggested that Fedor Dostoevskii's translation of Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet justifies a bilingual edition. We still do not have, and may, indeed, never have a Balzac/Dostoevskii edition of the novel, but Julia Titus's Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac, is, to my knowledge, the first monograph fully devoted to the subject.
It is not, however, the first to appreciate the importance of Dostoevskii's earliest publication or to consider it a cradle of Dostoevskii's poetics. Since Leonid Grossman's pioneering analysis, Dostoevskii's translation has been the subject of several articles and chapter-length studies (Robert L. Busch, Sergei Kibal΄nik, Valentina Nechaeva, Svetlana Shkarlat, Karen Stepanian, Rayfield). It has also been addressed, if less extensively, under the broader rubric “Dostoevsky and Balzac.” Although Titus's book traverses some of the same ground, her book complements the existing work in significant and insightful ways.
Titus's scrupulous examination of Dostoevskii's “free” translation reveals a pattern of departures from Balzac's original that allow her to argue that these were intentional choices reflective of the translator's fledgling poetics. She catalogues, for instance, a series of changes in Dostoevskii's depiction of Evgeniia (the Russified name is part of Dostoevskii's effort to domesticate the French original) designed to heighten her religious attributes, spiritual strength, and connection to Christian symbolism. At the same time, as Titus demonstrates, Balzac's Eugénie became a model for one of Dostoevkii's recurring female types. Alexandra Mikhailovna in Netochka Nezvanova, the heroine of “The Meek One,” Sofia in Raw Youth, and Sonya in Crime and Punishment are all shaped, in their essential aspects, after Balzac's heroine. As concerns Grandet, his portrait, too, is stripped in Dostoevskii's translation of the modicum of balance imparted to it by Balzac for the sake of highlighting his monomaniacal greed and establishing an even starker contrast with the idealized portrait of Evgeniia. Titus further shows how Dostoevskii's portrait of Grandet reverberates with the echoes of Pushkin's Miserly Knight, an instance of literary assimilation also registered by other scholars.
Like Eugénie, Old Grandet, according to Titus, inaugurates several themes that would stay with Dostoevskii for the rest of his writing career: from psychology of an all-consuming passion to money as a touchstone of characters’ integrity. In tracing the theme of money in Dostoevskii's later works, Titus, however, notes an important difference. To Balzac's respect for luxury and elegance, which he links with refined sensibility, Titus contrasts Dostoevskii's loftier notion of beauty's inextricable connection to morality and God. This observation occurs within a broader discussion of the two writers’ respective approaches to representation of the material world. Although Dostoevskii shares Balzac's interest in the material environment he depicts, their accents fall differently. As Titus points out, Balzac tends to offer detailed descriptions of beautiful interiors and latest fashions, while Dostoevskii is drawn to the squalid, the impoverished, and the ugly. Titus also shows a similar logic at work in Dostoevskii's character descriptions, as illustrated by the example of The Brothers Karamazov, where the good-looking (and morally superior) characters are represented in general and compressed terms, while the most detailed and complete portrayals are reserved for Fyodor Pavlovich and Smerdiakov. These portraits, Titus further argues, reflect Dostoevskii's knowledge of the French theories of physiognomy that first reached him via Balzac. Titus offers a useful overview of these theories and uncovers their presence in both writers’ works.
It would have been interesting to know how Titus locates her study in relation to prior examinations of Dostoevskii's translation and where she stands on the issues they raise. Are there any Gogolian echoes in Dostoevskii's translation? Or is his idiom influenced largely by Aleksandr Pushkin? Can Dostoevskii's amplification of Evgeniia's virtues be a tribute to Romantic conventions rather than a reflection of the young writer's religious values? Indeed, how deep did these values run in the twenty-three-year-old Dostoevskii? And what do we do with the readings that emphasize the numerous omissions of religious symbolism and rhetoric, including in the representation of Eugénie, like the excision of a lengthy comparison of the heroine to the Virgin? It would also be reassuring to know that the 2014 Azbuka edition of Dostoevskii's translation used in the study is, indeed, the original 1844 text (reprinted in Dostoevskii's Canonical Texts edited by Vladimir Zakharov), and not one the subsequent versions identified by other researchers.
These questions aside, Titus's study offers an illuminating account of an important moment in Dostoevskii's creative career and sheds further light on the larger question of, to quote Priscilla Meyer, “how the Russians read the French.”
