Remains To Be Seen: Constance Garnett and the English Afterlife of Dostoevsky's Corpses

Abstract

In the field of translation studies, an original text awaiting translation is commonly likened to a corpse awaiting resurrection. In this study of Constance Garnett's translations of Dostoevsky, I propose that the translation‐as‐reanimation trope be taken literally. Dostoevsky's unburied corpses–Netochka Nezvanova's victimized mother, the narrator's dead wife in A Gentle Creature, Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot, and Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov–are designed to provoke religious and hermeneutic crises as they lie exposed to spectators and readers. Intent on solving these crises, Garnett's translation strategies redeem, resurrect, and provide miracles for the foreign bodies of and in literature. Approaching Dostoevsky from the perspective of translation studies ultimately offers a range of insights about new methods of evaluating translations, the connections between bodily remains and literary transmission, and Dostoevsky's own texts as metafictional works that anticipate future translators. Taken together, these insights illustrate one manner in which the Anglophone world in the early twentieth century encountered the remains of Russian realism.