Notes from Underground

'This is my wanting, this is my desire. You will scrape it out of me only when you change my desires.' To translate the scullery verb v yskoblit' ('to scrape out') as 'eradicate' or 'expunge,' as has been done, to exchange the 'collar of lard' the narrator bestows on the wretched clerk in Part Two for one that is merely 'greasy,' is to chasten and thus distort the voice of this man who is nothing but a voice.

There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Motes from Underground that raises something more than a question of 'mere tone.' The second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovek, has most often been rendered as 'I am a spiteful man.' Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for 'spiteful' (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning 'wicked,' 'bad,' 'evil.' The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zlaya ved'ma (zlaya being the feminine of zloy). The opposite of zloy is dobryi, 'good,' as in 'good fairy' (dobraya feya). This opposition is of great importance for Notes from Underground; indeed it frames the book, from 'I am a wicked man' at the start to the outburst close to the end: 'They won't let me… I can't be… good!' We can talk forever about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the translation of zloy as 'spiteful' instead of 'wicked' is not inevitable, nor is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky. Besides, 'wicked' has the lucky gift of picking up the internal rhyme in the first two sentences of the original.

Richard Pevear

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

mikhail bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985. The classic study of Dostoevsky's formal innovations and the place of his work in the traditions of Menippean satire and carnival humor. Joseph frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation 1860- 1863, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 1986. Volume three of Frank's five-volume socio-cultural biography of Dostoevsky, covering the period of composition of Notes from Underground. rene girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Fedor Dostoevsky, translated by James G. Williams, Crossroad, New York, 1997. A translation of Dostoievski, du double a I'unite (Plon, Paris, 1963), especially interesting for its analysis of the erotic/mimetic aspects of Dostoevsky's work. Robert louis jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature, Greenwood Publishers, Westport, CT, 1981. w. j. leatherbarrow, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2002. A collection of essays by various hands dealing with Dostoevsky's works mainly in terms of their cultural context. olga meerson, Dostoevsky's Taboos, Studies of the Harriman Institute, Dresden University Press, Dresden-Munich, 1998. A penetrating study of the metapsychology of tabooing and the meanings of the unsaid in Dostoevsky. konstantin mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, translated by Michael A. Minihan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1967. The work of a distinguished emigre scholar, first published in 1947 and still the best one-volume critical biography of Dostoevsky. Harriet murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1992. Richard peace, Dostoevsky's 'Notesfrom Underground': Critical Studies in Russian Literature, Bristol Classical Press, London, 1993. james p. scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2002. lev shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, translated by Bernard Martin and Spencer Roberts, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1967. Essays by one of the major Russian thinkers of the twentieth century. lev shestov, In Job's Balances, translated by Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney, J. M. Dent and Sons, London, 1932. Contains an important essay on Dostoevsky and Notes from Underground - 'The Conquest of the Self-Evident.' victor terras, Reading Dostoevsky, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1999. A summing up by one of the most important Dostoevsky scholars of our time.

CHRONOLOGY

DATE

AUTHOR'S LIFE

LITERARY CONTEXT

1821

Born in Moscow.

1823-31

Pushkin: Evgeny Onegin.

1825

1830

Stendhal: Le Rouge et le Noir.

1831

Hugo: Notre Dame de Paris.

1833-7

At school in Moscow.

1834

Family purchases estate of Darovoe.

Pushkin: The Queen of Spades. Sand: Jacques.

1835

Balzac: Le Pere Goriot.

1836

Gogol: The Government Inspector. Chaadaev: Philosophical Letters. Pushkin founds The Contemporary.

1837

Death of mother.

Enters St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering.

Dickens: Pickwick Papers. Death of Pushkin in duel.

1839

Death of father, assumed murdered by serfs.

Notes of the Fatherland founded by Andrey Kraevsky. Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme.

1840

Lermontov: A Hero of Our Time.

1841

Death of Lermontov in duel.

1842