N.V. Gogol, Louis Viardot, Ivan Turgenev and the story Viy: Lost in translation

The paper examines the first French translation of N.V. Gogol’s novella Viy, published in 1847 in the newspaper Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires (dated December 16, 17 and 18) and then included in the edition published in the same year under the the general title Nouvelles russes. Traduction française publiée par Louis Viardot (“Russian stories. Translated into French, published by Louis Viardot”). The book also includes Old-World Landowners, Notes of a Madman, Taras Bulba and The Carriage. Louis Viardot, in a short preface to the book, admitted that he was assisted in translation by two Russians, whose names he hid under the initials, but who were in fact I.S. Turgenev and S.A. Gedeonov were hidden. Since the extent of the involvement of each of them is unknown to us, but we only know that Viardot himself did not know the Russian language and therefore could only edit the already translated text (or an interlinear translation), the question arises: how adequately could Gogol’s texts be translated with such a triple collaboration and what kind of idea about Gogol did the French reader receive from becoming acquainted with these works. Accordingly, the purpose of this article was not just to compare the Russian original and the French translation on the basis of one specific example, namely, the story Viy, but also to reconstruct and at the same time explain the impression that the story could make when it got into the French context. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that as a result of a double reduction of the fantastic by Gogol himself for the second edition of the novella and, on the other hand, of a straightening of Gogol’s writing by the translators in accordance with the requirements of an elegant style, Viy was perceived as a kind of a paraphrase of E.T.A. Hoffmann, who had already gone out of literary fashion in the 1840s.

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