No Smoke without fire? Mrs Garnett and the Russian Connection

Abstract

This article charts the career and astonishing output of the translator Constance Garnett, whose English-language version of the Russian classics at the turn of the nineteenth century contributed directly to the “Russian fever” that took hold of the reading public. Mrs Garnett’s own political engagements are evoked, so as to understand better the profile of a translator who, while most famous for her renderings of Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, was also translating more directly incandescent material. Her 1908 translation of an eye-witness’s account of the Potemkin mutiny is particularly studied here. Throwing light on the historical and ideological context of the translations, it becomes clear that Mrs Garnett’s subsequent reputation owes more to her era than former commentators may have allowed. It also becomes clear that, far from lingering in the byways of history, the translator is very directly caught up with both the preservation and the re-appropriation of the past.