Constance Garnett

Constance Clara Garnett (1861–1946) was an English translator who made the great works of Russian literature available to English-speaking readers[3][7] and published more than 60 volumes of translations of Russian literature between 1894 and 1934[1]. Born in Brighton in 1861, Garnett translated 70 volumes from Russian, including all Dostoyevsky's novels[2], and created the first mass English-reading audience for Dostoevsky and Chekhov[1].

Early Life and Education

Born in 1861 in Ship Street, Constance was the younger sister of Clementina who was to become a Trade Union pioneer[6]. Garnett had been born 17 years earlier, the sixth of eight children of David Black and Clara Patten Black[7]. Born to a coroner and the daughter of a famous mathematician in 1861, Garnett grew up in the seaside resort town of Brighton, England[4].

Her childhood had not been a happy one. She suffered from tuberculosis until the age of seven[7]. At age 3, Garnett was plagued by enteritis, sciatica, migraines, and a debilitating bone infection that left her unable to walk on her own until she was seven[8]. Fair-haired, short-sighted, and in poor health all her life, Garnett had a pinched childhood[2].

A lover of reading and pupil of Brighton and Hove High School pupil, Constance, earned a scholarship to study Latin and Greek at Cambridge[6]. In 1879, Constance Garnett received the highest score of more than 3,000 candidates who sat the entrance examination for Cambridge University[7]. The resulting scholarship to Newnham College allowed her, in the words of Carolyn Heilbrun, to "escape from the suffocating prison that was the life of the usual Victorian girl"[7]. When she went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, as a scholar at 17, she had never before left Sussex[2].

Garnett had been a whiz at ancient Greek at Cambridge University and seemed to absorb languages the way some artists absorb textures, shapes, and colors[1]. She read classics and math, both of which provided rigorous training in the art of translation and the expression of precise meanings[2].

Key Influences and Mentors

During the 1880s, she enjoyed the cultural life of the capital, became interested in social causes, and joined the Fabian Society[7]. Garnett worked at the People's Palace, a library designed to improve the education of working people in London's East End[2].

This is when her husband introduced her to a Russian immigrant named Feliks Volkhovsky at a party held at the Garnett estate. An exiled revolutionary, Volkhovsky was an editor for the Free Russian Press, a socialist journal, and encouraged Garnett to take on the difficult task of learning his native tongue[4]. "She began learning Russian just before she turned thirty when she fell in with a gang of fiery exiles," Wheeler gushes. "Connie befriended many Russian Jews who had fled persecution after the assassination of Alexander Il"[1].

Garnett eventually found the time to learn during her first pregnancy with the help of another Russian dissident named Sergei Stepnyak and began translating Leo Tolstoy's famous philosophical essay, "The Kingdom of God is Within You"[4]. Garnett learned enough of the language in a few months that, with the encouragement of a charismatic Russian revolutionary, she began translating a novel by Ivan Goncharov: "The first sentence took hours to puzzle out, but I soon advanced to translating a page a day"[1].

Professional Development

In 1889, she married Edward Garnett, a budding writer and literary critic. Three years later, during her only pregnancy, she started to study Russian at the suggestion of a Russian émigré living in England[7]. She married Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader and would-be novelist who started a newspaper for cats (motto "Cave Canem") which included a food column[2].

She made sufficient progress that shortly after the birth of her son David she was able to translate Ivan Goncharov's A Common Story into English. Its appearance in print in 1894 began a career that over the span of the next 34 years witnessed the publication of 72 volumes of Russian novels, short stories, and plays in very readable English translations[7].

Garnett also derived her success from having access to the publishing industry through her husband's job as a publisher's reader for Jonathon Cape. This allowed her translations to be published cheaply and to become readily available to the masses[4].

Her work rate was astonishing. Her friend D. H. Lawrence described her sitting in the garden accumulating a tottering pillar of sheets on the grass alongside her[2]. Perhaps the greatest factor that aided Garnett's rise to prominence in the professional translating world was her ability to translate documents with great speed. Despite the many ailments she suffered from, which included blindness in the twilight of her life, Garnett was able to translate over 70 works of Russian fiction during her relatively short translation career[4].

Personal Life

The couple's only child, David Garnett, was born on 9 March 1892 in Brighton. David grew up to become a noted novelist and publisher, best known for works like Lady into Fox (1922), and was a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, associating closely with figures such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant[11].

The Garnett family home in Kent served as a vibrant literary hub, attracting writers and intellectuals who sought Edward's editorial guidance and the couple's hospitality; visitors included Conrad and Lawrence, who found inspiration in the stimulating conversations and rural tranquility[11]. The couple set up home in Surrey in a cottage where Constance once picked 27 quarts of blackberries in a day and found a mouse preserved in a jar of treacle. In 1905 the Garnetts took a flat in Hampstead[2].

Constance went to Russia twice[2]. By 1894 Constance was leaving her young son and husband at home to make trips to Russia, sometimes of three months in length – no mean feat for a single woman traveller at the time – to meet the writers whose work she was translating[6]. On her first journey she met Tolstoy at his Moscow house, where he praised her translation of his The Kingdom of God Is Within You and asked her to translate his revision of the Gospels[1]. On one occasion she battled the snow to have lunch with Tolstoy at his snowbound estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where he wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. She reported that his 'piercing eyes seemed to look right through one and to make anything but perfect candour out of the question'[6].

Translation Career and Major Works

She began translating from the Russian with Turgenev, with whom she felt a deep affinity[2]. She introduced Dostoevsky and Chekhov to English audiences in addition to translating almost all of the writings of Turgenev and many of those of Tolstoy, Herzen, and Gogol[7]. Translating scores of volumes for commercial publication, including all of Dostoyevsky's novels, hundreds of Chekhov's stories and two volumes of his plays, all of Turgenev's works and most of Tolstoy's, as well as selected texts by Herzen, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky[8].

When she took on Chekhov he was barely known outside his own country despite his fame at home. Garnett had tried to get someone to publish Chekhov in English and nobody would—imagine that her typescript of The Cherry Orchard languished in the drawer of her settle for many years. Characteristically, she kept at it until she achieved success[2]. During the war years she translated seven volumes of Dostoyevsky. Garnett made Dostoyevsky a household name, and he did the same for her[2].

Previous English editions of Russian novels, such as Clare Bell's translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, were based on earlier French translations and thus deprived readers of the true spirit of Russian literature. By contrast, Garnett's translations came from the original Russian text and attempted to convey the Russian authors' desired meaning[4].

She once said, "The qualifications for a translator are to be in sympathy with the author he is translating, and most important of all to be in love with words and interested in all their meanings"[1].

Later Years and Health Decline

By the early 1930s, Constance Garnett's health had deteriorated significantly, prompting her retirement from translation work following the publication of Three Plays by Ivan Turgenev in 1934, which marked the completion of her 71st volume. Her lifelong dedication to the demanding process of translating Russian literature—often involving dictation due to her worsening eyesight—had taken a profound physical toll, leaving her increasingly frail and partially blind by the late 1920s[11]. Failing eyesight caused her to cease translating in 1928[7].

This decline was further compounded by a heart condition that caused breathlessness and required her to use crutches in her final years. After the death of her husband, Edward Garnett, in 1937, Constance[11] became increasingly reclusive. She died two days before her 84th birthday in December 1946[7].

Legacy and Impact

This output made her, in the opinion of Rachel May, "the most famous translator of Russian literature of all time"[7]. Garnett almost single-handedly made Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and the rest of them, available to the English speaking (and reading) world, and by so doing brought a different kind of literature[5]. And as Carolyn G. Heilbrun has written: "All those for whom Russian Literature was the new found land of this century[early 20th]looked to Constance Garnett as the great revealer. Literally millions of readers were indebted to her for their first knowledge of a vast new realm of fiction and drama"[5].

Ernest Hemingway was one of many who admired her Dostoyevskys, as well as her Tolstoys. "I remember," he told a friend, "how many times I tried to read War and Peace until I got the Constance Garnett translation"[2]. Of her Turgenev, Joseph Conrad, another friend, wrote, "She is in that work what a great musician is to a great composer—with something more, something greater. It is as if the interpreter had looked into the very mind of the Master and had a share in his inspiration"[2].

Garnett's work extended its influence to global literature, inspiring American and British modernists who drew on her fluid prose to explore psychological introspection. Ernest Hemingway, for instance, credited her Dostoevsky translations with providing profound insights that informed his own stylistic innovations, while her renderings contributed to early discussions of existentialism by making Dostoevsky's explorations of alienation and freedom available to Western philosophers and writers. This permeation helped integrate Russian existential motifs into modernist discourse, enriching 20th-century literary movements[11].

Criticism and Controversy

Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky were among her biggest critics.[8] Nabokov dismissed her translations as "dry and flat, and always unbearably demure". Brodsky said of her translations that "the reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They are reading Constance Garnett"[8].

The critic Korney Chukovsky summed it up best and most brutally when he wrote, "Who does not feel the convulsions, the nervous trembling of Dostoevsky's style? . . . But with Constance Garnett it becomes a safe bland script: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original"[18].

Nevertheless, Garnett's translation work has provoked a great deal of controversy within the global translation services community. Particularly in her translations of Dostoevsky, Garnett often skipped over Russian phrases that were difficult to translate into English, essentially eliminating the unique voices of Russian authors[4].

Despite these criticisms, her work has stood the test of time. She had been weaned on the great English Victorian novelists, and she has their ear for language[2]. While some of her translations now seem dated, they exerted considerable influence on English literature during the first half of the 20th century. It is a tribute to their fluidity and accuracy that many remain in print a century after their original publication[7]. Regardless of these critiques, it's hard to ignore the fact that without Garnett's work, most of the English-speaking world would never have been exposed to Russian literature[4].