6 This last one Frank refers to as The Devils. One sign of the formidable problems in translating literary Russian is the fact that lots of FMD’s books have alternative English titles — the first version of Notes from Underground I ever read called itself Memoirs from a Dark Cellar. (back to text)
7 Never once in four volumes does Professor Frank mention the Intentional Fallacy7(a) or try to head off the objection that his biography commits it all over the place. In a way this silence is understandable, since the tone Frank maintains through all of his readings is one of maximum restraint and objectivity: he’s not about imposing any particular theory or method of decoding Dostoevsky, and he steers clear of fighting with critics who’ve chosen to apply their various axes’ edges to FMD’s work. When Frank does want to question or criticize a certain reading (as in occasional attacks on Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, or in a really brilliant response to Freud’s “Dostoevsky and Parricide” in the appendix to Volume I), he always does so simply by pointing out that the historical record and/or Dostoevsky’s own notes and letters contradict certain assumptions the critic has made. His argument is never that somebody else is wrong, just that they don’t have all the facts.
What’s also interesting here is that Joseph Frank came of age as a scholar at just the time when the New Criticism was becoming entrenched in the US academy, and the good old Intentional Fallacy is pretty much a cornerstone of New Criticism; and so, in Frank’s not merely rejecting or arguing against the IF but proceeding as if it didn’t even exist, it’s tempting to imagine all kinds of marvelous patricidal currents swirling around his project — Frank giving an enormous silent raspberry to his old teachers. But if we remember that New Criticism’s removal of the author from the interpretive equation did as much as anything to clear the way for poststructural literary theory (as in e.g. Deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist/Feminist Cultural Studies, Foucaultian/ Greenblattian New Historicism, & c.), and that literary theory tends to do to the text itself what New Criticism had done to the author of the text, then it starts to look as if Joseph Frank is taking a sharp early turn away from theory7(b) and trying to compose a system of reading and interpretation so utterly different that it (i.e., Frank’s approach) seems a more telling assault on lit theory’s premises than any frontal attack could be.
7(a) In case it’s been a long time since freshman lit, the Intentional Fallacy = “The judging of the meaning or success of a work of art by the author’s expressed or ostensible intention in producing it.” The IF and the Affective Fallacy (= “The judging of a work of art in terms of its results, especially its emotional effect”) are the big two prohibitions of objective-type textual criticism, especially the New Criticism.
7(b) (said theory being our own age’s big radical-intellectual fad, rather as nihilism and rational egoism were for FMD’s Russia) (back to text)
8 It seems only fair to warn you, though, that Frank’s readings of the novels are extremely close and detailed, at times almost microscopically so, and that this can make for slow going. And also that Frank’s explications seem to require that his reader have Dostoevsky’s novels fresh in mind — you end up getting immeasurably more out of his discussions if you go back and actually reread whatever novel he’s talking about. It’s not clear that this is a defect, though, since part of the appeal of a literary bio is that it serves as a motive/occasion for just such rereading. (back to text)
9 That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality’s almost impossible to describe or account for straight out — it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility — and critics’ attempts to reduce it to questions of “style” are almost universally lame. (back to text)
10 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author’s vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of time as “great” or “classic.” Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared “good for them” that they “ought to like,” at which point the students’ nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It’s like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire. (back to text)
11… especially in the Victorianish translations of Ms. Constance Garnett, who in the 1930s and ’40s cornered the Dostoevsky & Tolstoy — translation market, and whose 1935 rendering of The Idiot has stuff like (scanning almost at random):“Nastasya Filippovna!” General Epanchin articulated reproachfully.…“I am very glad I’ve met you here, Kolya,” said Myshkin to him. “Can’t you help me? I must be at Nastasya Filippovna’s. I asked Ardelion Alexandrovitch to take me there, but you see he is asleep. Will you take me there, for I don’t know the streets, nor the way?”…The phrase flattered and touched and greatly pleased General Ivolgin: he suddenly melted, instantly changed his tone, and went off into a long, enthusiastic explanation.…
And even in the acclaimed new Knopf translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the prose (in, e.g., Crime and Punishment) is still often odd and starchy:“Enough!” he said resolutely and solemnly. “Away with mirages, away with false fears, away with spectres!.. There is life! Was I not alive just now? My life hasn’t died with the old crone! May the Lord remember her in His kingdom and — enough, my dear, it’s time to go! Now is the kingdom of reason and light and… and will and strength… and now we shall see! Now we shall cross swords!” he added presumptuously, as if addressing some dark force and challenging it.
Umm, why not just “as if challenging some dark force”? Can you challenge a dark force without addressing it? Or is there in the original Russian something that keeps the above phrase from being redundant, stilted, just plain bad in the same way a sentence like “‘Come on!’ she said, addressing her companion and inviting her to accompany her” is bad? If so, why not acknowledge that in English it’s still bad and just go ahead and fix it? Are literary translators not supposed to mess with the original syntax at all? But Russian is an inflected language — it uses cases and declensions instead of word order — so translators are already messing with the syntax when they put Dostoevsky’s sentences into uninflected English. It’s hard to understand why these translations have to be so clunky. (back to text)