Penguins on Parade: The House of the Dead!

Some Penguin Classics don’t really seem to need updating. One such solid-looking piece of work is the translation David McDuff did for Penguin Classics of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1860 novel The House of the Dead. That translation appeared in 1985, and it – and all other translations of this particular book – are suddenly threatened with superfluity, since in March there’ll appear a new rendition from Knopf by the superstar Russian-translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. That translation will get the kind of review-coverage a Penguin Classic can only dream about (you can certainly look for my own review, in due course), and as has been the case with virtually every P&V translation that’s appeared in the last fifteen years, it’ll no doubt get called “definitive” by at least half a dozen monoglot freelancers. Suddenly, all previous translations will fall under a suspicion of being old or outmoded or some such left-handed condemnation.

As some of you Stevereads readers will know, I’m a great fan of outmoded translations. I love how oddly and sometimes fascinatingly they tend to reflect and warp the intellectual environment that produces them; I love the unabashed braininess that tends to infuse even the clunkiest translations of long works of literature (I’m less sanguine about poetry – the closer I get to age 30, the more convinced I am that poetry is, in fact, untranslatable)(a Stevereads diatribe for another day!).

But I get the best of both sides of the issue, since I also love the intense and sometimes prolonged book-world conversations that always result from the appearance of some high-profile new translation, regardless of what I think about the new translation itself. P&V have a pretty poor track record with me – I find their work jangly and needlessly showy, seemingly designed to dissuade readers from enjoying the works in question. But if their new translation of The House of the Dead sparks lots of first-rate discussion about the book itself, I’ll gladly read every instalment of that discussion.

Dostoevsky’s book details the ordeals faced in prison exile by Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, and the work is heavily autobiographical, reflecting the ordeal Dostoevsky himself underwent when he was sent to prison on 23 January 1850 to begin a four-year term in punishment for his part in the Petrashavest conspiracy. Dostoevsky had been a promising new author prior to his arrest, at which point his entire world ended and was replaced by a much smaller, more restrictive version. Long after the fact, he described it to his brother:

We lived all of a heap, crowded together in one barrack. Imagine, if you will, this dilapidated old wooden building which had long ago been scheduled for demolition, and which was now quite unfit for use. In summer the airlessness inside was intolerable, likewise the cold in winter. All the floors had rotted through. The floor was covered in nigh on two inches of muck; it was easy to slip and fall.

“Yet it would be a mistake to view the novel simply as a work of documentary realism,” McDuff writes in his slightly murky Introdcution to his translation:

It is important to realize that the book also describes an inner crisis – a spiritual death and an awakening. Dostoevksy is correct when he predicts that in the book his personality ‘will disappear from view.’ The tormented, eccentric Goryanchikov is all that the book contains by way of a characterized central figure.

Dostoevsky’s portrait of Goryanchikov’s sufferings ranges across a very wide spectrum (a spectrum of suffering that becomes from this point out a central characteristic of this writer’s work), from the iternal, emotional end (at one point he touchingly says, “I could never have conceived how terrible and agonizing it would be not once, not even for one minute of all the ten years of my imprisonment, to be alone”) to the bitterly psychological end (which, as always with Dostoevsky, is three-fifths self-pity, however justifiable in the present case):

When a common man goes to prison he arrives among his own kind of society, perhaps even among a society that is more developed than the one he has left. He has, of course, lost a great deal: his country, his family, everything – but his environment remains the same. An educated man, subject by law to the same punishment as the commoner, often loses incomparably more. He must suppress in himself all his normal wants and habits; he must make the transition to an environment that is inadequate for him, he must learn to breathe an air that is not suited to him …

The House of the Dead, with its vivid portrayals of Siberian exile in all its pathos, was a sales hit for Dostoevsky first serialized it in 1860, and having re-read it just recently in a kind of nerdish ‘preparation’ for the Pevear & Volokhonsky version, I can certainly see why: it moves fast, it sinks all the way down to the depths of human misery and yet still provides glimmers of hope amidst the squalor (there’s a famous scene where the inmates keep an injured eagle as a kind of barracks pet, and it’s every bit as heartbreaking now in my third re-reading of the book as it was the first time). It’s as riveting an example of the prison-memoir (I’m not quite as sold as McDuff on the idea of it being fiction) as I’ve ever read, and if Pevear & Volokhonsky can add a memorable translation to the tradition, more power to them.