The Great Inserted Tolstoyan Therefore

Does It Belong?

Occasionally I hear from other booksellers how hard they find it to buy for their store. There are millions of titles. You can’t know them all. You can put a few thousand on your shelves. “Oh God,” one owner said. “Who knows? Just use a dartboard.” Part of the problem is that most booksellers are dealing with new (“frontlist”) books. By definition you haven’t read them. All you have to go on is marketing and gossip. You look for informed insiders to get accurate gossip, or rely on authors’ names.

Here at Bookmarx we deal almost entirely with the “backlist,” older books which have been tried and tested. The advantage of this is that we can use our knowledge of the thousands of books we have read, and rely on customer advice as well. Lots of times we’re still just guessing. But often we are working behind the scenes to make sure we have the best books available.

That extends to translations. They affect our experience of great works of literature, but the people who need them - people who don’t read the original language - are generally the least qualified to evaluate them. I’m not dogmatic about translations: often I simply recommend that customers read the first paragraph of several translations and pick the one they think they will finish. But I also want to have available in my shop the translations which I think offer the most faithful version of a writer’s vision.

The intensity of that Tolstoyan look.

The number one book I recommend in my store is Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. I think it’s the greatest short story ever written. I don’t think there are any competitors that are particularly close. No other story so powerfully conveys one of my most deeply held convictions: that we can fill our lives with love and wonder and eternally valuable things, but most people don’t. They are like Ivan Ilych, dying on his bed while watching his family locked into a bourgeois conformity that ultimately means nothing: “He felt that he was so surrounded and involved in mesh of falsity that it was hard to unravel anything.”

Right at the beginning of the story is Ivan Ilych’s wake, where his widow has to pretend to be grieving while also trying to consult with Ivan’s colleagues about increasing her death benefit. The absurdity of it all is symbolized by a pouffe - a cushioned stool which a mourner sits on and which makes a creaking sound whenever he moves too much. The event is supposed to be solemn, but in fact everyone in the room is just thinking about how the pouffe keeps creaking. It’s absurd, so absurd it’s awful. Tolstoy’s whole worldview can be summed up in a single sentence from the book, which I had locked in my memory from when I first read the story: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

We had a little Bantam edition in the shop, handsome and cheap. I looked up the line, and it was different: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and commonplace – and most horrifying.” The horrifying vs. terrible quesiton is interesting, but more important was the omission of the therefore. It’s the therefore that really sums up the Tolstoyan worldview: you do things the way people normally do, says Tolstoy. Therefore your life is terrible. It’s the Great Tolstoyan Therefore.

We have a Wordsworth edition too. “The previous history of Ivan Ilych was the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most awful.” Again, the causal connection between normalcy and awfulness is missing.

After some searching, I found the translation I wanted: it’s called the Maude translation, by Aylmer and Louise Maude. We now regularly stock it. It’s out of copyright, as the Maudes were friends of Tolstoy and are long dead. It appears in the Warbler Classics edition (the one we carry most often), and the Arcturus edition of Tolstoy’s short stories. The translation is remarkable: one of the best reads in our language, and I encourage everyone who has not read it to do so. It also carries with it some authority, as Tolstoy indicated that the Maudes understood him well (he let them write his English authorized biography) and said of them, “Better translators… could not be invented.” Tolstoy read English well. And it is likely that he was specifically referring to the Ivan Ilych translation when he said this, as the Maudes did not translate many of his works.

Here is the twist, however: upon consulting the Russian, I see that the word “therefore” is not in the original. It was added by the Maudes. I cannot say if Russian tends to avoid such conjunctions for stylistic reasons or not, but the reason why most translations don’t have a “therefore” is because Tolstoy didn’t put it in himself.

It’s a great test case for fidelity in translation: word-for-word fidelity versus “dynamic” fidelity, fidelity to details or fidelity to the overall vision. I think that therefore expresses the whole idea of the story, indeed it captures Tolstoyism itself: normal life is a web of falsity, an entrapment in stupid things like pouffes. Therefore normal life is terrible, and we must escape it. The Maudes, who were intimate with Tolstoy, thought it should be inserted. Tolstoy himself may have approved of its insertion. But he didn’t write it himself. It’s the Great Tolstoyan Therefore, and it was inserted into the world’s greatest short story by a pair of unusually gifted translators.