two cheers for the inventor of the underground: Constance Garnett!

 

Monroe Beardsley wrote a long and rather brilliant essay about the Underground metaphor in Dostoevsky in which he acknowledges, as an aside, that Doestoevsky’s Notes from the Underground was actually named something like Notes from under the Floorboards, or from a Mousehole.

I bow down to Dostoevsky, but sometimes a translator should be her due. It was Constant Garnett who “mistranslated” that title. I believe Nabokov somewhere takes a shot at Garnett. Frankly, Garnett’s title is an improvement. Dostoevsky’s reputation worldwide depends, in part, on the fact that the “Underground” is a much more powerful image than “the Mousehole.” True, one of Kafka’s great short stories is called “The Burrow”, but it is not one of Kafka’s most known short stories, I think.

How did Constance Garnett bring the Underground to Dostoevsky – a pairing that seems absolutely appropriate?

I imagine – I have no letter or diary entry about this – but I imagine this is a case of cross-pollination. Constance Garnett learned Russian under the tutelage of a man named Sergei Stepniak, who had escaped from Russia and written a memoir, of sorts, about his career as a nihilist and agitator: Underground Russia. This was translated from Italian into English in 1882. It was not until 1893, however, that the Garnetts, who had all become Stepniak’s supporters, learned the real reason he fled Russia. In December, 1893, the New Review published an article from on Ivanoff, a pseudonym, detailing the moment that Stepniak – then under his own name, S. M. Kravchinskii – cut the cord, so to speak.  To quote Thomas Moser on the Stepniak affair from his article of 1992:

“On August 4, 1878, this man [Stepniak] acquired a kitchen knife.. At 9 a.m., “sneaking on tiptoe”, he plunged the knife into [General Mezentsev, the Russian police chief’s] abdomen, turned it round in the wound, jumped into the victoria (carriage) and rode out of St. Petersburg.”

The Garnett’s faced up to the knowledge that their friend was not just a revolutionary in theory, but a man who turned a knife in the abdomen of another man in fact, with a rather admirable tolerance. The General was no innocent. The deed had been committed in retaliation for the torture and capital punishment being meted out by the Czarist regime to revolutionaries. Death for death – as the pamphlet penned latter by Stepniak was entitled.

David Garnett, Constance Garnett’s son, wrote: "I had been brought up to accept acts of political murder and violence with sympathy bordering on admiration; I had known and respected at least two eminent assassins".  Probably Stepniak was one of them. Constance herself was a Fabian and 2^nd International socialist. She knew that the people who shunned Stepniak would shake the hands of torturers and murderers, as long as the latter were in uniform or had an aristocratic title. Although it became fashionable for a while, especially in the wake of Nabokov, to criticize Garnett for “bowdlerizing” Russian literature, the accusation is really this: she was a woman of the Edwardian era. Or, more simply: she was a woman. 

And she did things that few women do today. In 1904, she left her husband and 2 year old son in England and went to Russia, ostensibly to help with famine relief there, and - as a side project - to deliver letters from an exile Russian revolutionary community to revolutionaries inside Russia. 

But she is ever the "Victorian woman", just as Dostoevsky -  whose entire mature life coincides with the Victorian age - is always the modern novelist. This point made well by Claire Davidson-Pignon in the essay: “No Smoke without fire? Mrs Garnett and the Russian Connection.” Garnett’s politics – this was a woman who translated one of the first pamphlets about the Potemkin revolt into English, after returning from Russia in 1905 – is consistently neglected, in favor of terms like “gentility” and “Victorian.” I do wonder how many of her critics would be so “Victorian” as to mingle with an assassin who, according to the press, was a terrorist.

She was very much not a Victorian. She was very much an Edwardian, like Conrad. And as an Edwardian, she was more attracted to “Undergrounds” than mouseholes. In this, she was like H.G. Wells, who also wrote about undergrounds, and even Jules Verne. The ghost of Dostoevsky owes her.