Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T02:17:45.494Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Between Fiction and Physiology: Brain Fever in The Brothers Karamazov and Its English Afterlife

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2021

Jacob Emery  and
Elizabeth F. Geballe
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Working at the intersection of translation theory and medical humanities, this article interrogates the term brain fever, which Constance Garnett, adhering to clichés of English sentimental fiction, uses in reference to a wide variety of medical conditions in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Garnett's choice has become useful shorthand for the narrative function of delirium in Dostoevsky's works, but it obscures the sensitivity to medical terminology that informs the Russian texts. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky stages the conflict between Enlightenment rationality and religious mysticism by satirizing the terminology of medical authorities and contrasting it with the language of faith, which posits its own etiology for mental diseases. Garnett's abundance of interpolated brain fevers can be read not as a simple mistranslation but as marking the roles of translation and diagnosis in mediating the various cultural paradigms produced in fictional worlds.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 135 , Issue 5 , October 2020 , pp. 895 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Jacob Emery and Elizabeth F. Geballe

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. U of Minnesota P, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Speech Genres” and Other Late Essays. U of Texas P, 1986.Google Scholar
Balcells, M. “Medical and Neurological References in the Sherlock Holmes Stories.” Neurosciences and History. vol. 1, no. 3, 2013, pp. 137–43.Google Scholar
Bassnett, Susan. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. Routledge, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Beiaa ropaiKa” [“Belaia goriachka”; “Delirium tremens”]. [Entsiklopedicheskii slovar': Encyclopedic Dictionary]. Efron, 1890-1904.Google Scholar
“” [“Belaia goriachka”; “Delirium tremens”]. [Slovar' russkago iazyka; Russian Language Dictionary], Tipografiia Imperaterskoi Akademii Nauk, 1895.Google Scholar
Belknap, Robert. The Genesis of The Brothers Karamazov. Northwestern UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Zohn, Harry, Schooken Books, 1968.Google Scholar
Blakemore, Erin. “Did the Victorians Really Get Brain Fever?” JSTOR Daily, 30 Mar. 2017, daily.jstor.org/did-victorians-really-get-brain-fever/.Google Scholar
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Oxford UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Broughton, Rhoda. Not Wisely but Too Well. Tauchnitz, 1867.Google Scholar
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. J. M. Dent, 1932. 3 vols.Google Scholar
Carus, Carl Gustav. Psyche: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele. Pforzheim, Flammer und Hoffmann, 1846.Google Scholar
Collins, Joseph. The Doctor Looks at Literature. George H. Doran, 1923.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Houghton, Osgood, 1873.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Garnett, Constance, Heinemann, 1912.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Garnett, Constance, Macmillan, 1914.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Magarshack, David, Penguin, 1961.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “The Eternal Husband” and Other Stories. Translated by Garnett, Constance, Heinemann, 1917.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. A Gentle Spirit. Translated by Garnett, Constance, Kyros Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by Garnett, Constance, Heinemann, 1913.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by Carlisle, Henry and Carlisle, Olga, Signet Classics, 2010.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. [Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh; The Complete Collected Works of Dostoevsky in 30 Volumes]. Nauka, 1972-90.Google Scholar
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Possessed. Translated by Garnett, Constance, Heinemann, 1914.Google Scholar
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Round the Red Lamp. Methuen, 1894.Google Scholar
Durang, Christopher, and Innaurato, Albert. The Idiots Karamazov. Performance by Streep, Meryl, Dramatists Play Service, 1981.Google Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1979.Google Scholar
Frank, Joseph. A Writer in His Time. Princeton UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Frazier, Melissa. “The Science of Sensation: Dostoevsky, Wilkie Collins and the Detective Novel.” Dostoevsky Studies. vol. 19, 2015, pp. 7–28.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Dostoevsky and Parricide.” Dostoevsky: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Wellek, René, Prentice-Hall, 1962, pp. 98–111.Google Scholar
Garnett, Richard. Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life. Faber and Faber, 2009.Google Scholar
Gibian, George. “C. G. Carus' Psyche and Dostoevsky.” The American Slavic and East European Review. vol. 14, no. 3, 1955, pp. 371–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels. Cambridge UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goncharov, Ivan. 20 tomax [Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 20-i tomakh; The Complete Collected Works and Letters in 20 Volumes]. Nauka, 1997-.Google Scholar
Goncharov, Ivan. The Precipice. Translated by Bryant, M., Forgotten Books, 2012.Google Scholar
Good, Byron J. Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
“” [“Goriachka”; “Fever”]. [Slovar' Akademii Rossiskoi; Dictionary of the Russian Academy]. Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1806-22.Google Scholar
Ianovskii, S. D. “” [“Vospominaniia o Dostoevskom”; “Memories of Dostoevsky”]. Ō. M. [F. M. Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov; F. M Dostoevsky in the Memoirs of His Contemporaries], edited by Tiun'kin, K. and Tiun'kina, M., Khudozhenstvennaia literatura, 1990, pp. 230–51.Google Scholar
Katz, Michael. “Dostoevsky and Natural Science.” Dostoevsky Studies. vol. 9, 1988, pp. 63–76.Google Scholar
Khristoforova, O. B. [Oderzhimost' v russkoi derevne; Spirit Possession in a Present-Day Russian Village]. Neolit, 2016.Google Scholar
Knapp, Liza. “Mothers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov: Our Ladies of Skotoprigonevsk.” A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov, edited by Jackson, Robert Louis, Northwestern UP, 2004, pp. 31–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lotman, Yuri. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Shukman, Anne, U of Michigan P, 2000.Google Scholar
Malcolm, Janet. “Socks.” The New York Review of Books, 23 July 2006, www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/.Google Scholar
May, Rachel. The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English. Northwestern UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Meredith, George. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Archibald Constable, 1896. Vol. 2 of The Works of George Meredith.Google Scholar
Merrill, Reed B. “Brain Fever in the Novels of Dostoevsky.” The Texas Triquarterly. vol. 19, no. 3, 1976, pp. 29–50.Google Scholar
Mills, Thomas. Morbid Anatomy of the Brain in Typhus or Brain-Fever. 2nd edition, Hodges and McArthur, 1818.Google Scholar
Mochulsky, Konstantin. [Dostoevskii: zhizn' i tvorchestvo; Dostoevsky: His Life and Work]. YMCA Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Mochulsky, Konstantin. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Translated by Minihan, Michael A., Princeton UP, 1967.Google Scholar
Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom. Yale UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Muchnic, Helen. Dostoevsky's English Reputation, 1881-1936. Octagon Books, 1969.Google Scholar
Murav, Harriet. Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique. Stanford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Nabakov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature. Harcourt, 1981.Google Scholar
“” [“Nervicheskaia goriachka”; “Brain fever”]. [Tolkovyi slovar' zhivogo velikorusskago iazyka; Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language], by Vladimir Dal', M. O. Vol'v, 1905.Google Scholar
“” [“Nervnaia goriachka”; “Brain fever”]. [Slovar' inostrannykh slov, voshedshikh v sostav russkago iazyka; Dictionary of Foreign Words in the Russian Language], Izdatel'stvo F. Pavlenkova, 1907.Google Scholar
Nikoliukin, A. N. “” [“Dostoevskii v perevode Konstans Garnet”; “Dostoevsky in the Translations of Constance Garnett”]. [Russkaia literatura; Russian Literature], vol. 2, 1885, pp. 154–62.Google Scholar
Paris, Bernard J. Dostoevsky's Greatest Characters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Percy, Walker. The Last Gentleman. Picador USA, 1999.Google Scholar
Pershkina, Anastasia. “7 ” [“7 sekretov Prestuplenia i nakazania”; “Seven Secrets of Crime and Punishment”]. Arzamas, 23 Mar. 2017, arzamas.academy/mag/419-dost.Google Scholar
Peterson, Audrey C. “Brain Fever in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Fact and Fiction.” Victorian Studies, no. 19, 1976, pp. 445–64.Google Scholar
Rice, James L. Dostoevsky and the Healing Art. Ardis, 1985.Google Scholar
Sayers, Valerie. Brain Fever. Doubleday, 1996.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Doubleday, 1990, pp. 2–88.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. Wordsworth Editions, 1998.Google Scholar
Tolins, Stephen H. “Brain Fever.” The Baker Street Journal. vol. 41, no. 2, 1991, pp. 104–09.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Translated by Dole, Nathan Haskell, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1886.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. [Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 90 tomakh; The Complete Collected Works of Tolstoy in 90 Volumes]. Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1928-1964.Google Scholar
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa, Vintage Classics, 2008.Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge, 2008.Google Scholar
Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka. “What Does Ivan Karamazov 'Know'? A Reading through Foucault's Analytic of the 'Clinical' Gaze.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1995, pp. 23–44.Google Scholar
Worobec, Christine D. Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia. Northern Illinois UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Zagvazdin, Yuri. “Meningitis, a Whirlpool of Death: Literary Reflections and Russian Cultural Beliefs.” Literature, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders. vol. 206, edited by Stanley Finger et al., 2013, pp. 35–58.Google ScholarPubMed