DICKENS IN RUSSIA
Andrew Sanders
On Monday 7 February 1983 I had, as I
was obliged to say at the time, an honour
thrust upon me. Following in the footsteps
of at least one other of the distinguished
speakers at this Haarlem Conference, I
was asked to propose the toast to the
Immortal Memory of Charles Dickens at
the London Birthday Dinner. Most other
proposers of this toast are given several
months' notice. I had approximately one
hour. In the unexpected absence of the
proposed speaker - Count Nikolai Tol
stoy - I had, at the last minute, to stand in
for him. He would have got a free dinner
too. I had to pay for myself and, what was
worse, 1 had to report my own words as
well as those of other speakers at the
Dinner for publication in the Dickensian. I
had to jot down the speech at the table
during dinner, seated, dauntingly enough,
between my mother and Professor Kath
leen Tillotson.
I remarked at the end of that impromptu
speech - as I find in my own report of
myself in the Summer 1983 Dickensian -
that, being of Russian ancestry, Count
Tolstoy 'might have felt moved to expatia
te on the decline and fall of the Rooshan
empire and on the various fortunes of his
distinguished family'. Since 1983, how
much more he might now find to say! He
has been declared bankrupt after huge libel
damages were awarded against him (quite
unjustly, to my mind). Moreover, the
Rooshan empire has declined and fallen
and shrunk to a size unknown even in Leo
Tolstoy's time. Time brings in his reven
ges on Russia and Tolstoys, perhaps too
on speakers at Birthday Dinners.
Leo Tolstoy was a passionate Dickensian
which is why the Dickens Fellowship had
asked his distant descendant to propose a
festive toast. He was a passionate Dicken
sian because he and other nineteenth-centu
ry Russian writers recognized a sympa
thetic fellow-spirit in Dickens, a fellows
hip which has become a significant feature
of Russian cultural life.
Dickens's work was first translated into
Russian in the early 1840s and by 1843 the
influential Russian critic Vissarion Grigo-
rievich Belinsky was already prepared that,
after reading a translation of The Old
Curiosity Shop, Dickens's immense talent
had gone into a decline. Nevertheless,
Belinsky was prepared to acknowledge that
the 'immense talent' had recovered its
powers when Martin Chuzzlewit appeared
in Russian in 1844. He was also happy to
praise the early chapters of Dombey and
Son in 1848, though he died before the
complete translation had been published.
In that same 1848 Charles Dickens recei
ved a letter from the Russian translator of
Dombey, Irinarch Ivanovich Vvedensky
(1813-1855) (a man whose name John
Forster incompetently mangles as 'Tri-
narch Ivansvitch Wredenskii'). Vvedensky
had already rendered Pickwick Papers into
Russian; he was later to translate David
Copperfteld and The Haunted Man as well
as Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Charlotte
Bronte's Jane Eyre. In writing to Dickens
Vvedensky declared that he found it im
possible to portray 'faithfully the beauties
of the original in the Russian language,
which, though the richest in Europe in its
expressiveness, is far from being elaborate
enough for literature like other civilized
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