ABSTRACT
In her essay ‘The Russian Point of View’ (first published in her 1925 collection, The Common Reader), Virginia Woolf looked back on two decades in which the English had shown a particular curiosity about Russian literature. Despite making a number of confident (if not entirely original) assertions about Russian literature – Anton Chekhov’s depiction of the Russian soul is ‘[d]elicate and subtle, … subject to an infinite number of humours and distempers’, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels are ‘seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in’, Lev Tolstoy’s typical hero ‘gathers into himself all experience, turns the world round between his fingers, and never ceases to ask, even as he enjoys it, what is the meaning of it, and what should be our aims’1 – Woolf was nonetheless aware that the vision of Russia entertained by English readers was almost wholly dependent on the work of a crucial set of intermediaries:
Of all those who have feasted upon Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Tchekhov during the past twenty years, not more than one or two perhaps have been able to read them in Russian. Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the language spoken by natives; who have had to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of translators.2
