WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Dostoevsky cover

Dostoevsky

Chapter 3: TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
By André Gide
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

BiographiesEssays, Letters & SpeechesFrench Literature

About This Book

The author delivers a series of critical essays and addresses that examine a major Russian novelist’s imagination, method, and moral concerns, combining close readings of novels and letters with reflections on psychology, religious feeling, and narrative technique. He defends the novelist against charges of morbidity by analyzing the interplay of dreamlike excess and rigorous logic in character construction, explores recurring themes such as conscience, redemption, and prophetic social insight, and situates the work within European as well as Russian traditions. The volume includes introductory and translator notes, selections from correspondence, and an appendix that supports the interpretive essays.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

In the early months of 1922, M. André Gide delivered before M. Jacques Copeau’s School of Dramatic Art at the Vieux-Colombier a series of six addresses on Dostoevsky, first published from shorthand notes—with but slender emendation, lest the style should lose in spontaneity—in the Revue Hebdomâdaire, Nos. 2–8, 1923, then later in the same year in book form, together with selected essays. These addresses form the basis of the present translation from which two short chapters, Les Frères Karamazov and an Allocution lue au Vieux-Colombier pour la Célébration du Centenaire de Dostoïevsky, have been omitted by desire of the Author, who adapted his original preface specially for this English edition.

By courtesy of Messrs. William Heinemann, we are permitted to quote extensively from Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky’s Novels (12 vols., 1912–1920). We have utilized as far as possible Miss Ethel Colburn Mayne’s Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends (Messrs. Chatto and Windus, 1917): elsewhere we have cited J. W. Bienstock’s Correspondance et Voyage à l’Étranger (Paris, 1908). Quotations are further made from Bienstock and Nau’s version of the Journal (Paris, 1904), and from Th. M. Dostoevsky: eine biographische Studie, by N. Hoffmann (Berlin, 1899).