Prof Elizabeth Geballe: "Double Exposures: Translating Dostoevsky’s Corpses"

A morbid fact unites the corpses that feature in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction: almost all of them remain unburied. Among these bodies are Netochka Nezvanova’s murdered mother, the narrator’s dead wife in A Gentle Creature, Nastasya Filippovna and Hans Holbein’s Christ in The Idiot, and Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. In this talk, I will approach Dostoevsky’s canon of corpses in two ways. First, Dostoevsky’s aesthetic of exposure—one stronghold of his “fantastic realism”—is always connected to a hermeneutic crisis. Interpreting corpses, Dostoevsky’s characters participate in a drama of close-reading that becomes a lesson to Dostoevsky’s real-life readers. Exposed corpses teach us how to read texts that resist interpretation. Second, exposure is a key trope in the bourgeoning field of translation studies: original texts are likened time and again to dead bodies that are laid bare in new contexts and languages. Taking this metaphorical insight more literally, I ask what happens to Dostoevsky’s corpses in translation. How does Constance Garnett—Dostoevsky’s most famous translator—doubly expose these corpses? If all translation is interpretation, are translations bound to undermine Dostoevsky’s religious and aesthetic projects? I will argue that approaching Dostoevsky from the perspective of translation studies can teach us to read and redeem the foreign bodies of literature and in literature. Attention to acts of exposure can provide insight into Dostoevsky’s work, a new method for evaluating translations, and, more broadly, a map of the connections that can be drawn between body and text.