Prof Robert Fraser
Open University
Confession As Dialogue: Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Translation, And Sex Abuse
ABSTRACT: Some of the most intense scenes in Dostoevsky’s fiction are dialogues. The most disturbing is “At Tikhon’s” from The Possessed in which Stavrogin, whose name relates to Crucifixion, confesses having seduced an underage girl who then committed suicide. It does not appear in early printings of the novel because omitted at the publisher’s request and was only restored when discovered amongst Dostoevsky’s papers in 1921.
In 1922 Virginia Woolf, who was learning Russian with the help of her friend S. S. Koteliansky, collaborated with him in a translation of this scene, and published it through the Hogarth Press. What drew her attention to it? .We know that Woolf was herself abused by her half-brothers at much the same age as the girl in Dostoevsky’s novel. Was the translation a way of extirpating the memory? What effect did its publication have on Dostoevsky’s reputation and influence in England?
Robert Fraser is the author of twenty-seven books and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Asiatic Society. Having taught at the universities of Leeds, London and Cambridge, he is now Emeritus Professor of English in the Open University.