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Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology
Edited by Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn and Joep Leerssen
[Benjamins Translation Library 119] 2016
► pp. 109–126

Champion of the humiliated and insulted or xenophobic satirist?

Dostoevsky’s mockery of Germans in early translation

Although Dostoevsky’s name rarely triggers associations with humour among western readers, the writer entertained his Russian contemporaries by making fun of the German minorities. Folklore studies illustrate that the Russian collective consciousness perceived the German nation with mixed feelings. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the German character had become a trustworthy source of literary satire. Dostoevsky, often accused of ‘xenophobia’ as a political thinker, uses an original combination of literary techniques to systematically deride the Germans as a nation. A descriptive translation study, illustrated with examples from The Humiliated and Insulted, shows that this derision was largely and at least partly deliberately softened by his early German and Dutch translators. In so doing, they both supported and completed the systematic depiction of Dostoevsky as a tragic humanist, which dominated the critical dimension of his early European reception.
Keywords: Descriptive Translation Studies, folklore studies, lexicography, Russian narrative, Dostoevsky, xenophobia, national stereotypes, heteroglossia, German minorities in Russia
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The historical presence of Germans in Russia
  • The image of Germans in Russian folklore
  • The role of Germans in Russian literature until Dostoevsky’s rise
  • Dostoevsky’s essayistic attitude towards Germans
  • The depiction of Germans in The Humiliated and Insulted
  • Dissecting Dostoevsky’s satire on Germans
  • Dostoevsky’s satire on Germans in translation
  • Behind the translational shifts
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 February 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.119.07bou
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Boulogne, Pieter
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