Catalonia

More Than a Century of Dostoevsky
in Catalan1

Miquel Cabal Guarro

Introduction

Since the first work by Fedor Dostoevsky appeared in Catalan in 1892, and, more significantly, since some of his most relevant titles appeared in that language (between the late 1920s and the late 1930s), this canonical Russian literary figure has been regularly disseminated within the Catalan publishing market. Two hundred years have passed since Fedor Dostoevsky’s birth and more than a century since his irruption into the Catalan-language literary system. It is therefore time to address the circumstances specific to the Catalan publication of his works and to analyse the main achievements of Dostoevsky’s Catalan publishing history.

This essay will focus on the unique factors determining the stages of Dostoevsky’s dissemination in the Catalan cultural sphere. Firstly, I will tackle the emergence of Russian literature within the Catalan cultural milieu, particularly Dostoevsky’s arrival on this scene. I will also examine the role of certain key characters involved in his reception, namely the translators Andreu Nin, Francesc Payarols, and Josep Maria Güell, as well as the writers Carles Soldevila and Joan Sales, all of whom made both qualitative and quantitative contributions to Dostoevsky’s presence in the Catalan literary domain.

Different Waves

The Rather Unplanned Emergence of Russian Authors in Catalan

Although Dostoevsky is my main topic here, I will briefly explain the conditions and factors specific to the arrival of Russian literature in Catalonia. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Russian literature was still an unknown and exotic domain for the Catalan cultural milieu. Echoes of this vast artistic field arrived mainly from French reviews and newspapers, arousing growing interest. Perhaps inevitably, the first Russian author to be printed in a Catalan publication was Aleksandr Pushkin.2 The Catalan Newspaper (Diari català) was the first newspaper to be published in Catalan. During its short life (1879–81), it printed several articles relating to Russia; the editors tended to sympathise with subversive Russian movements of the time, namely Nihilism.3 By virtue of the Spanish Press Law of 1879, criticism of any national monarchy had to be censored by the Spanish authorities, and the Catalan Newspaper was suspended for continually siding with the Russian Nihilist movement and claiming overtly that Nihilists were in a “struggle for freedom” against the criminal tsarist monarchy.4 On 26 June 1879, the Diari català newspaper included one of Pushkin’s ‘Little Tragedies’: Mozart and Salieri (Motsart i Sal’eri, 1832). This short play in two scenes was translated into Catalan by a certain ‘P. R.’, the same initials as Pere Ravetllat, one of the editors in charge of literary affairs at the Diari català.5 The play was awkwardly subtitled ‘Poema d’Alexandre Poucrkine’. This clumsy misspelling provides a significant piece of information: on the one hand, the transcription of the author’s name is clearly French, so the source language of the Catalan version becomes indisputable; on the other hand, by confusing an upper-case H with an upper-case R, the typesetting probably indicates that nobody in the newspaper was aware that a poet named Pushkin actually existed. The editors must have admired the so-called ‘tragedy’ in its French form and translated it without making further inquiries. Whether the misspelling already existed in the French version lies beyond the scope of my present research.

The next translation into Catalan of an entire literary work of Russian origin appeared in 1886, with more noticeable consequences. The book In Solitary Confinement: Impressions of a Nihilist (En cellule. Impressions d’un nihiliste, 1879) by Isaak Pavlovskii (1852–1924), a Russian journalist, writer, and revolutionary activist who spent extended periods in Catalonia, France, and Spain, was translated from the French version by the renowned Catalan writer Narcís Oller (1846–1930), under the author’s personal supervision.6 In his preface to this volume, the translator describes the fortuitous nature of the birth of Russian-Catalan cultural relations. A group of Catalan literary representatives of the ‘Renaixença’ neoromantic movement were meeting at their usual café.7 There they encountered Pavlovskii, with whom Oller later became close friends. Apparently, the Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós had sent Pavlovskii to encounter Oller and his colleagues.8 As Oller describes their meeting:

Slightly more than a year ago the whole group of poets and writers at Cafè Pelayo struck up a strong and lasting friendship with a young man, a Russian national, who had just arrived in Barcelona aiming to seriously study our literature, our history, our traditions, and the way we live and think nowadays. That extremely observant young man, his very direct and instructive conversation, polite manners, and kind behaviour was Isaac Paulowsky [sic], the author of the Memoirs which form this book.9

Russian translations into Catalan and Catalan translations into Russian were probably triggered by this personal encounter, after which Pavlovskii and Oller (‘deux frères’, in Pavlovskii’s own words) started to correspond, exchanging more than 160 letters over four decades.10 Subsequently, Oller translated (from French) various works by Aleksandr Ostrovskii, Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Pavlovskii, while Pavlovskii was responsible for translations into Russian of works by Oller and Àngel Guimerà, both extremely influential Catalan fin-de-siècle writers. Thus, the door was already open; Catalan interest in Russian literature was real. It was not long before more translations from Russian into Catalan appeared, finally including some of Dostoevsky’s works.

The First (Relatively Shy) Stage:
The Late Nineteenth Century

Translations from Russian spread through different European countries for very similar reasons. As the scholar and translator Carol Apollonio has written of the Anglophone world:

Literary, cultural and political values tend to drive literary translation, particularly in the Russian case. […] The interest in Russian literature […] that began in the early [twentieth] century was inspired both by the reading public’s fascination with Russian radical political movements and by the fin de siècle avant-garde. […] The influx of political exiles […] and the sensational developments of the Bolshevik Revolution contributed to the ‘Russian craze’.11

Hence, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the main triggers for translating from Russian into Catalan were probably, in Apollonio’s words, “the reading public’s fascination with Russian radical political movements and the fin de siècle avant-garde”.12 The fact that the first translation from a Russian author appeared in a strongly libertarian newspaper like the Diari català seems to confirm this argument. The press and non-fiction literature (like Pavlovskii’s book, mentioned above) might have been key factors for the so-called “Russian craze”, as Sandra Pujals explains:

The evidence suggests that non-fiction literature and the press may have actually played a more significant role than fiction in the construction of collectively accepted cultural visions that would be later transformed into literature or as in the case of Spain’s fin de siècle literary elite would give way to the mysterious fascination with Russian literature and its application as a model for modern literature in Spain.13

Since political and cultural contexts determine the production and reception of translations,14 all of these socio-political elements conditioned the dissemination of Russian literature in Catalonia. Among them, there is one particularly important circumstance that influenced the Catalan cultural scene. Spain’s political instability throughout the nineteenth century and its defeat by the US in 1898 strengthened the Catalan movement of national construction (Catalanism), whose policies clearly focused on language and culture, and which primarily supported republicanism and federalism.15 But these same historical policies also fostered Spanish nationalism, which generally supported the monarchy and a centralised state and which in turn helped to provoke the Catalan nationalist reaction.16

Thus this rather agitational political environment might have aroused Catalan interest in the political convulsions afflicting Russian society at the same time and opened the field of international relations of exchange between Russia and Catalonia, specifically at the cultural level (of literature and translation) since, as Heilbron and Sapiro remind us, “translation has multiple functions: as an instrument of mediation and exchange it may also fulfil political or economic functions and constitute a mode of legitimation”, in this case, of emergent Catalanism.17 In the shadow of this movement, during the 1880s and 1890s a set of literary publications arose. These were directed towards building a complete and modern literary system which aimed to enlarge the linguistic-literary capital of Catalan, a dominated language whose development was suspended, and which needed to be “recreated”.18

This cultural operation encompassed the dissemination of the new aesthetic forms and subjects circulating across fin-de-siècle Europe, which the Catalan intelligentsia usually accessed through French publications.19 These publications, which included Russian literary works, served as sources for the first indirect translations from Russian into Catalan via French.20 Of this group of new Catalan publications, one proved unusually active in exploring unknown literary tradition. This was The Renaissance (La Renaixensa), a Catalanist and rather conservative biweekly magazine that, from 1892 to 1900, also published a literary supplement devoted to both Catalan and foreign novels. The magazine and its literary collection introduced foreign literature to the Catalan scene, including Russian titles. Catalan publications were trying hard to catch up with literary discussions elsewhere in Europe, and Russian authors were, of course, a point of interest since “one might remember that the mythification of the Russian novel was precisely one of the most prominent phenomena of the European turn of the century”.21

Works by Tolstoy, Pushkin, Vladimir Korolenko, Nikolai Gogol, Turgenev, and finally by Dostoevsky featured in the pages of La Renaixensa.22 Dostoevsky’s first texts published in Catalan were the novellas An Honest Thief (Chestnyi Vor, 1848; Lo lladre honrat, 1892), and The Landlady (Khoziaika, 1847; Un vell amant, 1892).23 An Honest Thief appears as an anonymous text in the magazine’s year index, though the work is subtitled “a translation of Dostoevsky”. There is no mention of the translator, which is unusually remiss for La Reinaxensa; the periodical generally credited the names of translators since they provided evidence of both cultural responsibility and literary intentionality. The translation of The Landlady is credited to Juli Gay. It therefore seems reasonable to credit Gay also as the translator of the unsigned An Honest Thief, since it would be odd for a periodical to publish two works by the same author within the same year and entrust two different translators with the assignment. The translator Juli Gay is a rather obscure figure, deserving of further microhistorical research.24

Regarding the social context of the reception of Russian (or any other) literature in the late nineteenth-century Catalan cultural milieu (and in fact up to the present day, with some obvious major discrepancies), one must take into account the presence of the Spanish language in Catalonia. In the 1880s and 1890s, members of the urban, educated Catalan population were literate in Spanish. The Catalan population’s degree of bilingualism at this period was extremely unequal, and dependent on several factors, including social class (the upper classes had a far better command of Spanish), and location (cities were much more receptive to foreign languages).25 The cultural elite of the time could read the first mentions of Dostoevsky and other Russian authors in both Catalan and Spanish periodicals,26 as well as the first translations of Dostoevsky’s works into Spanish, which had appeared in 1890, slightly prior to the author’s first Catalan translations.27 Also, the first Dostoevsky novels to appear in Spanish were mainly issued by Maucci, a publisher from Barcelona, and translated from French versions.28

These nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French pivot translations from the Russian, especially of Dostoevsky’s works, usually distorted the original. The Russian text was adapted to the translator’s taste, excerpts (or even whole chapters) were deleted, names were changed, passages were freely rewritten, etc., so the result was drastically removed from the original, both in terms of substance and form.29 These adaptations, although unacceptable today, were considered reasonable at the time. We should remember that:

Canons of accuracy in translation, notions of ‘fidelity’ and ‘freedom’, are historically determined categories. […] The viability of a translation is established by its relationship to the cultural and social conditions under which it is produced and read.30

The first justification for the ‘free’ French translations is the aim of making the foreign author familiar in the translated version, “to move the author toward the reader,”31 a process which usually leads to “wholesale domestication of the foreign text.”32 This was common practice amongst almost all translators of that time from and into almost all European languages, with the possible exception of German translations.33

This ‘abusive’ form of adaptation was a general practice, but there seem to be other specific reasons in the early French versions for domesticating Dostoevsky’s texts. In his influential The Russian Novel (Le Roman russe, 1886), Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé stated that “The Idiot and The Possessed, and especially The Brothers Karamazov, are spun out to intolerable lengths” (“dans l’Idiot, dans les Possédés et surtout dans les Frères Karamazof, les longueurs sont intolérables”).34 Thus de Vogüé’s authority on Russian literature could be invoked to justify omissions from and ‘free’ adaptations of Dostoevsky’s texts over the next two decades, by blaming the excessive length of the original. André Gide’s articles on Dostoevsky of 1908 and 191135 eventually drew attention to the inaccuracy of extant translations,36 and explicitly suggested that the German versions (in particular) might have been more accurate. In Gide’s words: “In Germany translations of Dostoevsky follow one upon the other, each an improvement in scrupulous accuracy and vivacity on the one before.”37

When scrutinising these indirect translations, and recognising the differences between French and German versions, there is an important aspect to consider about the first Catalan translations of Dostoevsky. Comparison of the Catalan translation with Wilhelm Goldschmidt’s German versions appeared in 1886,38 and the degree of coincidence found in the solutions, omissions, and punctuation of both versions has led me to conclude that Dostoevsky entered the Catalan literary milieu through a German rather than a French filter. It seems clear that Gay used German translations by Goldschmidt as the source texts for his versions of Dostoevsky’s novellas An Honest Thief and The Landlady. It is a remarkable fact, since French has been commonly assumed as the main or only source of Dostoevsky’s titles not only for all the other Romance cultures, but even for other medium- and small-sized European languages, and this was also certainly the case for the vast majority of Catalan translations from Russian during this period. Hence this finding has dramatic implications for the study of the Russian author’s earliest reception in the Catalan literary milieu and might inaugurate an illuminating new research trajectory.

There is another relevant element to consider when approaching early translations of Dostoevsky: the role of censorship in modelling the text, whether the original source text, the pivot translation, or the final version. In the Russian Empire, authors were subject to strict political and moral censorship, a pressure that was obviously applied to Dostoevsky from the very beginning of his career as a writer.

By the time Dostoevsky began publishing in the mid-1840s, censorship requirements were an ever-present reality for writers. […] Writing about censorship in the 1870s, Dostoevsky recalled that in the 1840s censors ‘strictly suppressed’ ‘every new idea’ and forbade ‘almost everything’—even lines and dots were suspect as allegories or lampoons.39

From Dostoevsky’s correspondence, it is clear that he feared the reactions of the official censors sufficiently to adapt his works to accommodate them, and that he was more than once compelled to cut, ameliorate, and rewrite many of his original texts. But censors aside, Dostoevsky’s editors were also responsible for significant cuts and amendments: Stavrogin’s confession in The Possessed (Besy, 1872) is one of the most infamous cases.40 The original Russian text had already endured several levels of censorship by the time it reached Western European countries for translation into first French or German, and subsequently into other languages. But censorship did not end there for Dostoevsky, and even more agents were involved in the process of curtailing his texts.

Along with Vogüé and the critics of this first period, those who proceeded to translate Dostoevsky deemed it necessary to ‘protect’ the public from certain subversive—if not ‘unseemly’—aspects of his post-exile writings. […] No further sign, preface or disclaimer alerted the reader as to the extent to which the translation deviated from the original in content.41

Beyond the abovementioned discrete levels of censorship that had already altered the original Russian text, Alex McCabe emphasises that French translators also modified Dostoevsky’s texts for the sake of moral and political correctness. Besides the translators’ self-censorship, it is reasonable to think that French editors might also have censored actively for the same reasons. Hence, at this point we may assume that Catalan translators and editors proceeded in the same manner as their French counterparts. The result of this multi-layered censorship was an extremely questionable and rather unreliable Catalan translation. There is much more research to be done regarding the ethical and aesthetic outcomes in early Catalan translations, by taking into account the layers of censorship that consecutively affected Dostoevsky’s original works.

The Second (Solid) Stage:
From the Early 1920s to the Late 1930s

The debate over the accuracy and fidelity of French translations from Russian (and the fact that they were used as the source text for most Catalan translations which followed Gay’s German-sourced texts) peaked in the early 1920s. Some notable representatives of the Catalan intelligentsia (like Gaziel, Carles Riba and Joan Estelrich)42 were able to read German translations of Russian authors. It was probably this exposure, combined with perusal of André Gide’s articles about the unreliable French versions, that confirmed to them that almost all indirect translations that had been published up to that moment were disastrous, and especially those of Dostoevsky’s prose.43 Moreover, the Russian Revolution of 1917 exponentially increased interest in Russian history, culture, and literature, consequently increasing translations of the latter. The first direct translation from Russian into Catalan was made by the Czech polyglot Rudolf J. Slabý in 1921: it was a volume of Pushkin’s stories.44 As Slabý was not a native Catalan speaker, his translations required intensive correction. This first instance of direct translation contributed to raising both editors’ and other literary agents’ awareness of the need to be more meticulous with Russian translations, whether direct or indirect. Nevertheless, after editing Slabý’s second volume of Pushkin’s prose, which included only The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, 1836; La filla del capità, 1922), Estelrich declared in a letter to Riba, who had corrected the book, that the text types had to be re-set and that it was the last time he [Estelrich] would rely on “direct Slavic translations”, since he preferred “re-translations from Italian or German”.45 It is worth noting that French pivot versions were not used on this occasion.

In 1923 a theatrical version of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1881; Els germans Karamàzov), adapted by Jacques Copeau and Jean Croué for the Théâtre des Arts de Paris,46 was translated from French into Catalan by Josep Maria Millàs-Raurell.47 The adaptation was staged in the Romea Theatre in Barcelona, where it was first performed on 10 March 1923. The première was widely advertised in print media and was preceded by a debate on its appropriateness, since it was assumed that the play would “clash too violently with the mindset” of the Catalan public.48 La Vanguardia’s review of the play stated that “it is probably impossible to set on stage all the vigour contained in Dostoevsky’s story” and that “the translation is maybe too rigid and literarily meticulous, not sufficiently touching.”49

Dostoevsky’s next title rendered in Catalan was an indirect translation from French of the short story ‘The Beggar Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree’ (‘Mal’chik u Khrista na ëlke’, 1876; ‘El pobrissó a casa de Crist el dia de Nadal’), which was translated by David Jordi and appeared in the December 1924 issue of From Here and There (D’ací i d’allà), a cultural magazine. More indirect translations followed, such as The Landlady (Khoziaika, 1847; La dispesera, 1928), translated from French by Josep Carner Ribalta and published in the Biblioteca Univers collection. This collection was created and managed by the renowned writer and publisher Carles Soldevila (1892–1967), who was also in charge of the D’ací i d’allà magazine, and who was devoted to broadening and disseminating new (from the point of view of the Catalan tradition) literary styles and authors.50 In fact, this book was preceded in the series by Lev Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (Kreitserovaia sonata, 1889; La sonata a Kreutzer, 1928).

Soldevila was a Russian literature enthusiast, and was especially interested in Dostoevsky.51 Besides Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the series which he edited also published works by Leonid Andreev, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Maksim Gorky, Aleksandr Kuprin, and Ivan Turgenev. Nine out of the forty-six titles published before 1936 were written by Russian authors (that is, 19.6%).52 Only two of these books were translated directly from Russian (by Aleksei Markov, “the son of an exiled white Russian”)53 while the others were indirectly translated via French.54 In November 1928, Soldevila’s D’ací i d’allà published a well-documented article by Agustí Esclasans (a writer and journalist who had translated poetry by Valerii Briusov, Ivan Bunin, and Vladimir Maiakovskii from intermediate languages), claiming that Dostoevsky was an exceptional writer deserving of serious consideration: “What power Dostoevsky must have in his original language that, whether we read him in good or bad translations, he seizes us, controls us, and amazes us!”55

In December 1928, marking the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth, an article by Alfred Gallard about Russian literature and its reception in Catalonia was more critical of Dostoevsky, suggesting also that Russian literature had stagnated since the ascension of the Soviets.56 The contradictions between these articles illustrate a key moment in the reception of Russian literature in the Catalan cultural milieu. Interestingly, this period of efflorescence of Russian (and other foreign) literature coincided with the last years of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship (1923–30). Neither censorship nor the clearly anti-Catalan character of the regime had a discernible impact on the publishing industry. The number of translations and overall titles kept growing, and even The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, 1848; Manifest del partit comunista, 1930), as well as various books about Lenin, were published during those years.57

Also in 1928, the debate about whether to avoid indirect translations became intense. In a long article about Russian literature in Catalonia, Josep Farran i Mayoral stated:58

It is essential that translations are all direct from Russian and very accurate about and respectful of the expressive qualities and defects of the authors. Otherwise, as is often the case, we would offer Russian authors only a second- or third-hand interpretation; which actually means a falsification.59

But the very same year Dostoevsky’s Uncle’s Dream (Diadushkin son, 1859; El somni de l’oncle) appeared in the new world literature collection ‘A Tot Vent’ by Edicions Proa, translated from French by Prudenci Bertrana.60 This series, directed by Joan Puig i Ferreter,61 had previously published Tolstoy’s Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1899; Resurrecció, 1928) and soon became a crucial agent in the popularisation of Russian authors in Catalonia: thirteen books out of the ninety-two which it published in the next eleven years were Russian titles (that is, 14.1%).62

Nevertheless, Puig i Ferreter soon also insisted on direct translations from Russian, since he assumed that the previous distortion of Dostoevsky’s texts via intermediate language translations might afflict all translations from Russian. In the first catalogue of Proa’s ‘A Tot Vent’ collection, he wrote: “regarding the Russians, the question of direct translations has been posed. We’ve been concerned about this for a long time. Today we can say it is solved”.63 So in this series, the first direct Catalan translations of Dostoevsky’s works were to be published in 1929: Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866; Crim i càstig) by Andreu Nin and The Eternal Husband (Vechnyi muzh, 1870; L’etern marit) by Francesc Payarols.

For their professional commitment and accuracy, Nin and Payarols are regarded as icons of literary translation from Russian into Catalan.64 Born into a poor family, Nin (1892–1937) worked as a teacher and a journalist before starting his political career, through which he gained international visibility. He was a prominent member of different Communist and Anarcho-Syndicalist parties and organisations in Catalonia and abroad, including Soviet Russia, where he joined the Trotskyist movement. While in Moscow he began translating both fiction and non-fiction into Catalan for Proa and other publishing houses. Nin translated works by Boris Pil’niak, Nikolai Bogdanov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky, amongst others.65 His foreword to the Catalan version of Crime and Punishment contains valuable comments on the author’s style and gives significant information on how Dostoevsky was read in early 1930s Catalonia.66 In 1930, at the very beginning of Stalin’s purges, he returned to Catalonia, where he continued his political and literary activities until he was killed by the Soviet secret services during the Spanish Civil War.67

Payarols (1896–1998) was also born to a working-class family. He trained as a teacher, later working as a bookkeeper while teaching himself German, English, and Russian. He improved his Russian with lessons from the daughter of a Jewish Russian émigré family living in Barcelona. This non-professional teacher later became his wife.68 Payarols was offered his first translation commission from Russian by Puig i Ferreter in 1928. He translated into Catalan works by Chekhov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky.69 Since he had taught Catalan to the Soviet consul, Payarols was briefly detained by the Francoists before the end of the Spanish Civil War. Afterwards he suffered financial problems due to a lack of work. He was finally hired as a high-school teacher and continued translating for years, mainly from German and into Spanish.70

During the 1930s, there appeared translations of The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants (Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli, 1859; Stepàntxikovo i els seus habitants, 1933) by Nin for the Proa publishing house;71 and also of White Nights (Belye nochi, 1848; Les nits blanques, 1937), translated from French by Pere Montserrat Falsaveu for the ‘Quaderns literaris’ collection. A prospective translation of Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846) was listed as Pobra gent in the 1934 catalogue of Soldevila’s ‘Biblioteca Univers’, but never actually appeared. It is not clear which translator was assigned to it, or why it was never realised. Payarols claimed that he was originally commissioned by Puig i Ferreter to translate The Brothers Karamazov, but that after he had already translated three chapters Nin expressed his interest in taking on the project, to which Puig i Ferreter agreed. It seems that the chaotic months after Franco’s coup halted this project, so the book was never translated by any of these outstanding translators. Not until the 1960s did The Brothers Karamazov appear in Catalan (see below).72

A theatrical version of Crime and Punishment was premièred in Barcelona on 29 November 1936, when the Francoist military uprising was already in progress.73 The text was adapted by Josep Maria Jordà and Lluís Capdevila on the initiative of the Young Group of the Socialist Unified Youth of Catalonia, and was presented as a homage to the USSR in support of the anti-Fascist militias.74 The director supposedly used a French version of Dostoevsky’s book: rather surprisingly, as Nin’s direct translation into Catalan had been available since 1929.75 There are two key elements that can help to clarify the source choice for this adaptation. On the one hand, in November 1936 the Socialist Unified Youth of Catalonia, which had promoted the project, was in serious conflict with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, which was then led by none other than Andreu Nin.76 On the other hand, Gaston Baty’s theatrical adaptation of the same novel (as Crime et châtiment) had premièred in Paris on 21 March 1933, in the Théâtre Montparnasse. The dramatis personae of the French and the Catalan versions are very similar.77 Further research is required to determine the concrete circumstances of this translation.

After Franco’s victory in 1939, and during the harsh first decades of his dictatorship, literature and any other cultural expressions in Catalan were banned. In the 1960s, the Catalan cultural framework started timidly to recover, but political and moral censorship was always present as a threat to editors’ and translators’ projects.

The Third Stage: The Lazy 1960s and 1970s,
the Active 1980s and 1990s

The first book by Dostoevsky to be indirectly translated into Catalan after the Spanish Civil War was the aforementioned translation, previously cancelled because of that war: The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1881; Els germans Karamàzov, 1961), indirectly translated from different languages by the prominent writer and editor Joan Sales.78 Sales took as his main reference text the 1923 French translation by Henri Mongault and Marc Laval, but he also used Cansinos Assens’s Spanish translation (in its fifth edition) as well as Italian and English versions.79 Regarding possible problems with Francoist censors due to the nature of the book and the repression of Catalan cultural expressions during the Fascist dictatorship ruling Spain, on 21 October 1960 the head of the censorship section confirmed that the Catalan version of the book was permitted.80 This text was the last indirect translation from Russian into Catalan to be published, though it was revised and amended by the translator Arnau Barios in 2014.

From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, Josep Maria Güell translated twenty-one titles into Catalan, by authors like Nina Berberova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Gorky, Boris Pasternak, Iurii Trifonov, and, of course, Dostoevsky, amongst others.81 Güell is one of the most prolific translators from Russian both into Catalan and Spanish. He combined a fondness for the Russian language with his own literary activity as an expression of his personal rebellion against Franco’s dictatorship, and as an act of Catalan patriotism.82 Güell translated into Catalan Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (Idiot, 1869; L’idiota, 1982) for Edicions 62, The Possessed (Besy, 1872; Dimonis, 1987) for Edhasa publishing house and The Adolescent (Podrostok, 1875; L’adolescent, 1998) for Proa. In 1972, an allegedly direct translation of White Nights (Belye nochi, 1848; Les nits blanques) by Francesc Pagès appeared for Editorial Selecta, together with a new version of The Landlady (Khoziaika, 1847; La dispesera).83 Additional research is needed to clarify further details about the translator and the translation itself. In 1984, Laertes published Monika Zgustová’s first Catalan version of A Little Hero (Malen’kii geroi, 1849; El petit heroi).

The Current Stage: 2000-present

In recent decades, the emergence of several independent Catalan-language publishers, as well as the programme of grants initiated by the Russian Institute for Literary Translation (Institut Perevoda) has established a new framework for the translation of both classic and contemporary Russian authors into Catalan. Moreover, the celebration of the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth in 2021 marked a milestone in the history of Catalan versions of his books. Many of the bicentenary translators are former students of Ricard San Vicente and Helena Vidal, two prominent figures within Russian studies in Catalonia; they co-founded the department of Slavic Studies at the University of Barcelona in the early 1990s. All of these factors have contributed to the creation of an ecosystem favourable to cultural interchange between Russia and Catalonia.

In this recent period, two translations of Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ia, 1864) have been published: Apunts del subsol, by Miquel Cabal Guarro in 2002 for Llibres de l’Índex (revised in 2021 for Angle Editorial), and Memòries del subsol, by Raquel Ribó in 2004 for Destino. A theatrical adaptation by Carlota Subirós of Ricard Altés’s translation of White Nights (Belye nochi, 1848; Nits blanques, 2002) was staged at the Teatre Lliure in 2003. A translation of The Gambler (Igrok, 1867; El jugador) by Reyes García Burdeus and Teresa Camañes appeared in 2006 for 3i4 Edicions. In 2008, Arola Editors published a translation of The Grand Inquisitor (Velikii inkvizitor, 1879; El gran inquisidor) by Anna Soler Horta and Nina Avrova. The selection The Crocodile and Other Stories (El cocodril i altres narracions) was elected, edited, and translated by Margarida Ponsatí-Murlà in 2010 for Accent Editorial.84 The masterpiece Notes from the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mërtvogo doma, 1862; Memòries de la casa morta) was translated into Catalan by Jaume Creus in 2011 for Adesiara. In 2015, Angle Editorial published a new version of White Nights (Belye nochi, 1848; Les nits blanques) in my own translation.

In the year of the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth (2021), the following translations were issued: the compilation The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (El somni d’un home ridícul) by Marta Nin (a distant relative of Andreu Nin) for Comanegra,85 a translation of The Double (Dvoinik, 1846; El doble) by Xènia Dyakonova for Quid Pro Quo, a new translation of Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866; Crim i càstig) for Bernat Metge,86 a translation of A Gentle Creature (Krotkaia, 1876; Manyaga) for Angle Editorial as well as the first Catalan version of Poor People (Bednye liudi, 1846; Pobres) for Cal Carré, all of them my own. In 2022, theatrical adaptations of my versions of Crime and Punishment and A Gentle Creature were staged.87 Finally, in 2023 my translation of Summer Notes on Winter Impressions (Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechiatleniiakh, 1863; Notes d’hivern sobre impressions d’estiu) was published by Angle Editorial and a first volume of Dostoevsky’s selected letters (Letters 1838–1867; Cartes 1838–1867) was published by Edicions del Cràter.

Conclusion

Fedor Dostoevsky entered the Catalan literary scene on the back of aesthetic trends that arrived from France and Germany in the last decades of the nineteenth century. At that time, translations were in French and, to a much lesser extent, German, with the very first Catalan versions of Dostoevsky’s works were apparently translated from German. Even after the 1917 Russian Revolution, translations from Russian were mostly indirect and translators still preferred to use French pivot versions. When the first direct translations of Dostoevsky’s works were published in 1929 (Crime and Punishment by Nin and The Eternal Husband by Payarols), the notion arose that Dostoevsky’s style was crucial and needed to be preserved in any translation. In the years that followed, only one more indirect translation appeared: Joan Sales’s version of The Brothers Karamazov in 1961.

Since then, many of Dostoevsky’s works have been rendered into Catalan, but some outstanding issues remain: while there are three direct translations of White Nights, two of Notes from Underground, and two of Crime and Punishment, it is still impossible to read a direct translation of The Brothers Karamazov, for example. Similarly, there is still no Catalan version of The Humiliated and Insulted (Unizhennye i oskorblennye, 1861) or of Netochka Nezvanova (1849), to name just a few of his well-known works. It would also be of special interest to translate both the fiction and non-fiction material contained in the different volumes of A Writer’s Diary (Dnevnik pisatelia, 1873–81), since these texts would be both philologically and philosophically relevant to current Dostoevskian debates. The second and final volume of Dostoevsky’s selected letters will be published in 2024–25, in my own translation.

In the near future, I hope to publish further research on the following topics: the reasons and circumstances behind the cancellation of Poor Folk in 1934; the original text for the theatrical version of Crime and Punishment in 1936; the life and times of the translator Francesc Pagès; and, last but certainly not least, an in-depth analysis of the source texts for the first Dostoevsky translations into Catalan (The Landlady and An Honest Thief), along with some biographical details about their translator, Juli Gay. Finally, in the context of the project on ‘Francoist Censorship and Russian Literature (1936–1966)’, I expect to develop a new research angle on the different levels of censorship that afflicted Dostoevsky’s translations in Catalonia until 1966.

1 This work has been developed in the framework of the research project ‘Francoist Censorship and Russian Literature (1936–1966)’ (PID2020–116868GB-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation /AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

2 “Translations from Russian appear to have been an isolated phenomenon, rather than a planned activity with thematic uniformity. These texts were present in key French magazines of the time, and the work of writer-translators allowed for these snippets of Russian literature to enter the Catalan literary system. There was no consistency in the choice of the texts, and therefore the list of translated texts is eclectic and difficult to categorise”. Noemi Llamas Gomez, ‘Francesc Payarols and Andreu Nin, Agents of the Catalan Polysystem. Unmediated Translations from Russian in the 1930s: A Critical Overview’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018), p. 51, https://theses.gla.ac.uk/30794/.

3 On the construction of a cultural vision of Russian Nihilism in the liberal press of Spain as well as the flexible boundaries separating the press and the literary realm in the late nineteenth century, see Sandra Pujals, ‘Too Ugly to Be a Harlot: Bourgeois Ideals of Gender and Nation and the Construction of Russian Nihilism in Spain’s Fin de Siècle’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 46 (2012), 289–310.

4 Josep M. Figueres i Artigues, El primer diari en llengua catalana: ‘Diari Català’ (1879–1881) (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1999), pp. 116–17.

5 Figueres i Artigues, Diari Català, p. 170; Manuel Llanas and Ramon Pinyol, ‘Les traduccions en el Diari Català’, Anuari Verdaguer, 12 (2004), 81–90 (p. 88).

6 Isaac Paulowsky, Memorias d’un nihilista, trans. by Narcís Oller (Barcelona: La Ilustració Catalana, 1886).

7 A clear and detailed explanation in English of the nature and leading actors of this movement can be found at Open University of Catalonia, Lletra (Catalan Literature Online): La Renaixença (The Catalan Cultural Renaissance), https://lletra.uoc.edu/en/period/la-renaixenca/.

8 José Manuel González Herrán, ‘Un Nihilista Ruso En La España de La Restauración: Isaac Pavlovsky y sus relaciones con Galdós, Oller, Pardo Bazán, Pereda’, Anales Galdosianos, XXIII (1988), 83–105 (p. 84), http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmcpp153.

9 “No fa gayre més d’un any que tot l’esbart de poetas y escriptors del cafè de Pelayo entaulá fonda y perdurable amistat ab un jove, rus de nació, que venía á Barcelona disposat á estudiar en serio nostra literatura, nostra historia, nostras costums, nostre actual modo d’ésser y pensar. Aquell jove, en alt grau observador, de conversa discretíssima é instructiva, de finas maneras y de tracte per demés simpátich, era n’Isaac Paulowsky, autor de las Memorias que forman aquest llibret.” Narcís Oller, ‘Preface’, in Paulowsky, Memorias, pp. 5–9 (p. 5).

10 Anna Llovera Juncà, ‘Correspondència d’Isaac Pavlovsky a Narcís Oller, 1907–1908. Presentació i edició’, Anuari TRILCAT: Estudis de Traducció, Recepció i Literatura Catalana Contemporània, 2013, pp. 84–104 (p. 85), https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5803374.

11 Carol Apollonio, ‘Dostoevsky: Translator and Translated’, in Dostoevsky in Context, ed. by Deborah A. Martinsen and Olga Maiorova (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 236–43 (p. 240).

12 Ibid.

13 Pujals, Too Ugly, pp. 292–93.

14 Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro, ‘Outline for a Sociology of Translation. Current Issues and Future Prospects’, in Constructing a Sociology of Translation, ed. by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2007), pp. 93–107.

15 “From the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been a revival of Catalanist sentiment, of Catalan literature and of the language whose official use had been banned since the eighteenth century. This was intensified by the federalist movement from 1868 to the collapse of the First Republic. Nowhere was federalism as strong as in Catalonia.” Paul Preston, A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain 1874–2018 (London: William Collins, 2020), p. 50.

16 Borja de Riquer i Permanyer, ‘La débil nacionalización española del siglo XIX’, Historia Social, 1994, pp. 97–114.

17 Heilbron and Sapiro, Outline, p. 103.

18 Pascale Casanova, ‘Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire. La traduction comme échange inégal’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 144 (2002), pp. 7–20.

19 Jordi Castellanos, ‘La novella antimodernista: les propostes de La Renaixensa’, in Professor Joaquim Molas: Memòria, Escriptura, Història, ed. by Rosa Cabré and others, 2 vols (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2003), I (2003), pp. 215–328 (p. 315).

20 Ramon Pinyol i Torrents, ‘Les traduccions de literatura russa a Catalunya fins a la Guerra Civil: esbós d’una bibliografia’, in Traducció i Literatura: Homenatge a Ángel Crespo, ed. by Soledad González Ródenas and Francisco Lafarga (Vic: Eumo, 1997), pp. 247–64 (p. 248).

21 Castellanos, La novella, p. 324.

22 Pinyol i Torrents, ‘Les traduccions de literatura russa’, pp. 253–54.

23 Anonymous, ‘Lo lladre honrat (Traducció de Dostoiewsky)’, no translator credited, La Renaixensa, XXII/34–35 (1892), pp. 529–37 and pp. 545–50; Fedor Michailowitch Dostoiewski, ‘Un vell amant’, trans. by Juli Gay, Novelas catalanas y extrangeras (fulletó de La Renaixensa), I (1892), pp. 713–40.

25 Francesc Bernat, Mireia Galindo, and Carles de Rosselló, ‘El procés de bilingüització a Catalunya en el segle xx a partir de testimonis orals’, Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana, 30 (2020), 97–111 (p. 100), https://doi.org/10.2436/20.2504.01.162.

27 The first Spanish translations of Dostoevsky were A Hundred-Year-Old Woman (Stoletniaia, 1876; La Centenaria (Cuento ruso), 1890) and ‘A Christmas Tree and a Wedding’ (‘Elka i svad’ba’, 1848; ‘Cálculo exacto. Cuento ruso’, 1890), both published in the magazine Modern Spain (La España Moderna), which also issued Notes from the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, 1862; La casa de los Muertos. Memorias de mi vida en la cárcel de Siberia, 1892). On the chronology and circumstances of the reception of Russian literature in the Spanish literary milieu, see Julia Obolenskaya, ‘Historia de Las Traducciones de La Literatura Clásica Rusa En España’, Livius: Revista de Estudios de Traducción, 1 (1992), 43–56; Jordi Morillas Esteban, ‘F. M. Dostoievski En España’, Mundo Eslavo, 10 (2011), 119–43; Dzhordi Moril’ias and Nataliia Arsent’eva, ‘Ispanskoe Dostoevskovedenie: istoki, itogi i perspektivy’, in Dostoevskii. Materialy i issledovaniia, ed. by Konstantin Barsht and Natalia Budanova (Saint-Petersburg: Institut Russkoi Literatury RAN, 2013), vol. XX, pp. 305–28.

28 Moril’ias and Nataliia Arsent’eva, Ispanskoe, pp. 309–11.

29 Ivan Garcia Sala, ‘Olga Savarin i altres històries de la traducció indirecta del rus al català al segle xx’, in Traducció indirecta en la literatura catalana (Actes del V Simposi sobre traducció i recepció en la literatura catalana contemporània), ed. by Ivan Garcia Sala, Diana Sanz Roig, and Bożena Zaboklicka (Lleida: Punctum, 2014), pp. 145–68; Alexander McCabe, ‘Dostoevsky’s French Reception: From Vogüé, Gide, Shestov and Berdyaev to Marcel, Sartre, and Camus (1880–1959)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013).

30 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 4.

31 “In my opinion, there are only two possibilities. Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, trans. by Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 43–63 (p. 49).

32 Venuti, Invisibility, p. 4.

33 Ibid., p. 5.

34 Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, Le Roman russe (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1886), p. 255; English translation quoted from Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, The Russian Novel, trans. by Colonel H. A. Sawyer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1916), p. 250.

35 André Gide, ‘Dostoïevsky d’après sa correspondance’ (1908) and ‘Les Frères Karamazov’ (1911), in André Gide, Dostoïevsky (articles et causeries) (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1923).

36 Ivan Garcia Sala, ‘Olga Savarin’, p. 151.

37 André Gide, Dostoevsky, trans. by Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 170.

38 F. M. Dostojewskij, Erzählungen (‘Die Wirtin’, ‘Christbaum und Hochzeit’, ‘Helle Nächte’, ‘Weihnacht’, ‘Der ehrliche Dieb’) (Leipzig: Verlag von Ph. Reclam ‘Universal-Bibliothek’, 1886).

39 Irene Zohrab, ‘Censorship’, in Dostoevsky in Context, ed. by Deborah A. Martinsen and Olga Maiorova (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 295–302 (p. 296).

40 Ibid.

41 Alexander McCabe, ‘Dostoevsky’s French Reception’, p. 63.

42 Gaziel was the pen name of Agustí Calvet (1887–1964), an influential journalist, writer and publisher; Carles Riba (1893–1959) was a skilled poet, writer and translator; Joan Estelrich (1896–1958) was a writer, publisher and politician. The three of them were active and prominent figures in the Catalanist movement until the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).

43 Ivan Garcia Sala, ‘Olga Savarin’, pp. 152–7.

45 Ivan Garcia Sala, ‘Olga Savarin’, p. 152.

46 Jacques Copeau and Jean Croué, Les Frères Karamazov, drame en 5 actes (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1911).

47 Els germans Karamazov, adaptation in five acts from Dostoevsky’s novel by Jacques Copeau and Jean Croué, trans. by Josep M. Millàs-Raurell (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Escola Catalana d’Art Dramàtic, 1923), Biblioteca Teatral.

48 Manuel Reventós, ‘Notes Sobre Teatre. L’esforç d’enguany’, La Revista, 1923, 24–25.

49 ‘Els germans Karamazov’, La Vanguardia, 13 March 1923, p. 22.

50 Montserrat Bacardí, ‘Carles Soldevila, socialitzador de la literatura’, Quaderns: Revista de Traducció, 8 (2002), 51–66 (p. 57).

51 Ivan Garcia Sala, ‘Olga Savarin’, p. 156.

52 Pinyol i Torrents, ‘Les traduccions de literatura russa’, p. 250.

53 Ibid., p. 249.

54 Montserrat Bacardí, ‘Carles Soldevila’, p. 57.

55 ‘Quina ha d’ésser la força de Dostoiewski en sa llengua original, si àdhuc llegit a través de bones o males traduccions, ens empunya, ens domina i ens admira!’, Agustí Esclasans, ‘La Força de Dostoiewski’, D’ací i d’allà, 131, vol. XVII, November 1928, p. 387.

56 Alfred Gallard, ‘Tolstoi (1828–1928)’, La Revista, July-December 1928, pp. 99–102.

57 Jordi Chumillas i Coromina, ‘Traducció i edició a Catalunya durant la primera dictadura del s. xx (1923–1930)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Vic, 2007), p. 81.

58 Josep Farran i Mayoral (1883–1955) was an essayist, a journalist and a translator.

59 ‘És indispensable que les traduccions siguin totes directes del rus i ben acurades i ben respectuoses envers les qualitats i els defectes expressius dels autors. Altrament, com s’ha fet sovint, no donaríem dels autors russos, sinó una interpretació de segona, o tercera mà; cosa que vol dir en realitat, una falsificació’. Josep Farran i Mayoral, ‘La literatura russa i nosaltres II’, La Veu de Catalunya, 29 August 1928, p. 5.

60 Prudenci Bertrana (1867–1941) was a modernist novelist who developed his career outside the Catalan cultural mainstream.

62 Pinyol i Torrents, ‘Les traduccions de literatura russa’, p. 251.

63 Ivan Garcia Sala, ‘Olga Savarin’, p. 157.

64 An extended study about the contribution of Francesc Payarols and Andreu Nin to the Catalan literary system between 1928 and 1937, and about the specificities of the Catalan literary milieu at the beginning of the twentieth century can be found in Llamas, ‘Francesc Payarols and Andreu Nin’.

65 Pinyol i Torrents, ‘Les traduccions de literatura russa’, pp. 256–7.

66 Andreu Nin, ‘Pròleg del traductor’ (‘Translator’s Preface’) to Fedor Dostoevsky, Crim i càstig (Badalona: Proa ‘A Tot Vent’, 1929), pp. 5–11 (pp. 10–11).

67 Judit Figuerola, Andreu Nin, revolucionari i traductor (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2018).

68 Pilar Estelrich, ‘Francesc Payarols, traductor’, Quaderns: Revista de Traducció, 1 (1998), 135–51.

69 Pinyol i Torrents, ‘Les traduccions de literatura russa’, pp. 256–7.

70 Estelrich, ‘Francesc Payarols’, pp. 143–45.

71 This unusual choice is defended by Llamas in his doctoral thesis: “The only plausible explanation behind this choice is that whilst books such as The Humiliated and Insulted, Notes from the Underground, and The Gambler (among others) had been translated into Spanish, The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants had not been at that point. […] By translating a novel not previously available in Spanish, Proa took a risky bet in order to attract the public towards an exclusive text. This makes sense from a marketing point of view, as translating one of the novels mentioned above meant the Catalan text would have to compete with its Spanish version already in the market, as well as the French in some cases”, pp. 177–78.

72 Pilar Estelrich, ‘Francesc Payarols, traductor’, p. 142.

73 Josep M. Figueres i Artigues, ‘Lluís Capdevila, corresponsal de guerra. Les cròniques al front d’Aragó (1936–1938)’, Gazeta, 2, 2010, pp. 61–71 (p. 63).

74 La Vanguardia, 1 December 1936, p. 6.

75 Núria Camps Casals, ‘Lluís Capdevila i Vilallonga: un traductor de l’època de preguerra entre la memòria i l’oblit’, Quaderns: Revista de Traducció, 22 (2015), 181–92 (p. 184).

76 Josep Puigsech Farràs, ‘Popular Front, War and Internationalism in Catalonia During the Spanish Civil War’, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 37:1 (2012), 146–65 (pp. 154–55).

77 The Catalan version appears in Dostoievski, ‘Crim i càstig, drama en tres actes’, adapted by Josep M. Jordà and Lluís Capdevila, Catalunya teatral, 95, 1936. The dramatis personae of Baty’s version is listed in a note on the title ‘Crime et châtiment’ in Les Célestins. Saison 1965–1966 (with no pagination). It is very likely that this list of characters is the same as that in 1933.

78 Joan Sales i Vallès (1912–83), writer, translator, and publisher, one of the renowned figures of the Catalan literary milieu under the Franco dictatorship. After fighting on the Republic side, Sales had to go into exile (France, the Dominican Republic and Mexico). Once he had returned to Catalonia in late 1940s, he founded Club Editor publishing house, where The Brothers Karamazov was to appear.

79 Cansinos Assens’s translation was first published in 1935; its fifth edition appeared in 1953. Ivan Garcia Sala, ‘Algunes observacions en l’anàlisi comparativa d’Els Germans Karamàzov de Joan Sales’, in La traducció i el món editorial de postguerra, ed. by Sílvia Coll-Vinent, Cornèlia Eisner, and Enric Gallén (Lleida: Punctum, 2011), pp. 39–53 (pp. 40–1).

80 Lara Estany Freire, ‘La censura franquista i la traducció catalana de narrativa als anys seixanta’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2019), p. 112.

81 Figuerola, Andreu Nin, p. 245.

82 Xènia Dyakonova and José Mateo, ‘El personatge obscè. Visita retrospectiva als traductors de la prosa russa al català’, Revista del Collegi Oficial de Doctors i Llicenciats en Filosofia i Lletres i en Ciències de Catalunya, 2011, 63–80 (p. 76).

83 Editorial Selecta was founded in 1946; it was one of the first publishing houses permitted to print books in Catalan after the Spanish Civil War, including both translations and titles written originally in Catalan.

84 This volume includes ‘A Nasty Story’ (‘Skvernii anekdot’, 1862; ‘Un episodi vergonyós’), ‘Bobok’ (‘Bobok’, 1873; ‘Bobok’), ‘Another Man’s Wife and a Husband Under the Bed’ (‘Chuzhaia zhena i muzh pod krovat’iu’, 1848; ‘L’esposa d’un altre i el marit sota el llit’), and ‘The Crocodile’ (‘Krokodil’, 1865; ‘El cocodril’).

85 This volume includes Novel in Nine Letters (Roman v deviati pis’makh, 1847; Una novel·la en nou cartes), ‘A Weak Heart’ (‘Slaboe serdtse’, 1848; ‘Un cor dèbil’), ‘An Honest Thief’ (‘Chestnii vor’, 1848; ‘Un lladre honest’), ‘A Gentle Creature’ (‘Krotkaia’, 1876; ‘Una noia dòcil’), and ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (‘Son smeshnogo cheloveka’, 1877; ‘El somni d’un home ridícul’).

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