Greece:

Two Translation Periods in Dostoevsky’s Canon Formation in Greece (1886–1900 and 1926–54)

Christina Karakepeli

Introduction

This chapter will examine the role of translation in Fedor Dostoevsky’s reception in Greece: a largely smooth and successful process, ever since his introduction to Greek readers at the end of the nineteenth century.1 Within the Modern Greek literary field, Dostoevsky’s translations may be used as a case study for how the reception of Russian literature has developed diachronically, and how (re)translations and the agents involved in the translation process (translators, publishers, editors) have contributed to Dostoevsky’s canonisation in Greek culture. I will argue here that the act of translation adds to the symbolic value of a literary work and can be a means of canonisation for a foreign author being introduced to a receiving culture.2 Translations and retranslations can be studied as an index to measure the successful reception of a particular author within a foreign culture.3 The success of the canonisation process depends on the power of consecration that the agents involved in the translation process hold—namely, the translators, publishers, editors, and advisors—and on the discursive strategies they adopt when presenting the work of a foreign author to the national readership.4

The systematic productions of (re)translations of Dostoevsky’s work that continue with the same, if not higher, frequency today have sustained this author’s visibility for more than a century in different socio-cultural contexts of the Modern Greek literary field. In this chapter, I will focus my analysis on two critical periods in the reception of Dostoevsky in Greece: namely, the last two decades of the nineteenth century when the writer was first translated into Greek, and the interwar and postwar period when Dostoevsky’s collected works were first published in that language. To enable my assessment of the reception of Dostoevsky through translation in these historical periods, I will examine the socio-cultural factors that shaped translation and publishing choices; how the socio-cultural context affected readers’ reception of Russian literature and Dostoevsky; and how publishers and translators reacted to these changes.

I will suggest that Dostoevsky was introduced to Greek readers in the late nineteenth century as an author of canonical status, and that he has retained his position at the centre of the foreign literature canon in Greece largely thanks to the work of Greek translators. Among Dostoevsky’s numerous Greek translators in the nearly 150 years since he was first introduced to Greek readers in 1886, two names stand out: Alexandros Papadiamantēs (1851–1911) and Arēs Alexandrou (1922–78). Papadiamantēs, an author often characterised as the ‘Greek Dostoevsky’, wrote the first translation of Crime and Punishment into Greek in 1889. Alexandrou’s translations of Dostoevsky—made in the 1940s and 1950s—are considered the best available in Greek, enjoying the status of standard editions.

This essay will argue that Papadiamantēs’s consecration and the popularity of Alexandrou’s translations contributed to the canonisation of Dostoevsky in Greek culture. The work of these two translators reveals the historical importance of translation in the development of a national literary field and demonstrates how translators—especially when they are credited—create literary value by making foreign authors part of the receiving culture.

Nineteenth-century Translations of Dostoevsky

First Translations in Greek Periodicals (1886–99)

Greek translations of Russian literature were first published in Greek periodicals during the second half of the nineteenth century.5 The main distributors of these translations were newspapers and literary journals. These newly established periodicals followed European literary trends by primarily publishing French authors and their romans populaires, a preference which waned as the century came to a close.6 During the last decades of the century, critics’ and readers’ fatigue with French popular literature (which some saw as superficial and morally detrimental)7 and a move from Romanticism towards Naturalism in Greek literature, created the need for a new literary model that could appeal to the late nineteenth-century Greek reader. This literary vacuum was filled by translations from ‘Northern’ literatures—Russian and Scandinavian writing—a trend which gained momentum in the twentieth century.8 Production of translated Russian literature picked up from the 1880s, with the number of Russian authors translated increasing with each year.9 Despite a common misconception that nineteenth-century Greek translators relied on French intermediate translations, a large percentage of translations, as my research has clarified, were from the original Russian and written by Russian-speaking translators.10 The authors most frequently translated into Greek during the nineteenth century were Ivan Krylov, Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Lev Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov.

The rising popularity of Russian authors with Greek readers from the 1880s onwards was due in part to the positive influence of French criticism, particularly the work of Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (1829–1916).11 France was “the chief place of consecration in the world of literature”, exporting literary works to the rest of the world after “impressing them with the stamp of littéralité”.12 In his study Le Roman russe (1886), de Vogüé recognised the literary value of Russian authors, effectively elevating them to canonical status within the world literary field. De Vogüé’s Le Roman russe was well-known to Greek critics, who disseminated his work in Greece.13 As French-speaking intellectuals, many of whom had studied and lived in France, they carefully followed literary movements as they were exported from Paris, “the capital of the literary world”.14 The consecration of Russian authors by French critics, who had the power to define and legitimate the literary and the modern, was enough to warrant the positive reception of Russian authors in Greece. It could be argued that Russian writers’ canonisation in Greek was almost instant; their consecration initially established by French criticism and then disseminated in Greece firstly by French-speaking intellectuals and secondly by Greek critics who, as we shall see further on, saw in the works of Russian authors a model for their own national literature.

The first translations of Dostoevsky into Greek were published in the late 1880s. The first Greek translation was the short story ‘A Christmas Party and a Wedding’ (‘To dendron tōn Christougennōn kai gamos’) (‘Elka i svad’ba’, 1848), published on the front page of the Athenian newspaper Akropolis on Christmas Eve 1886.15 It was translated by Theodōros Vellianitēs (1863–1933), a Russian-speaking journalist and translator, who was among the first Greek critics to advocate for Russian literature. Vellianitēs had studied in Russia and later travelled across the country writing reports on the latest news for the Greek press.16 When he returned to Athens, Vellianitēs took upon himself the role of introducing Russian literature to Greek readers either through his own translations from Russian or in articles for newspapers and literary journals. In an 1889 article entitled ‘Modern Russian Literature’, Vellianitēs made the case for importing Russian literature into Greece as a factor in “invigorating […] [the] dwindling Greek literature”.17 Vellianitēs praised Russian literary works for their “originality” and “national colour”, writing that:

In Russian writers, the life and actions of a young and spirited nation shines through. The Russian writer does not seek to add anything foreign to Russia. He depicts traditions, desires and feelings that are inherently Russian, and he depicts them so faithfully that his books can be considered mirrors reflecting the nation’s life […]. The Russian writer does not have literary prejudices, nor does he follow rules set by others. He has his own manner of writing and his own aesthetic values.18

Vellianitēs’s emphasis on the national character of Russian literature had particular weight at a time when Modern Greek literature was still emergent. After its recognition as an independent state in 1831, Greece was trying to re-imagine itself as a modern European nation after four hundred years under Ottoman rule. Part of constructing the national identity involved envisioning what Modern Greek literature should look like: what its goals, language, style, and themes should be. Literary critics dismissed national literature produced in the first decades after Greece’s independence as a passive mimesis of European literary models, which failed to reflect the realities of Greek society in the nineteenth century.19 According to Vellianitēs, for national literature to distinguish itself from the “wrinkled” and “exhausted” literatures of European nations without becoming a bad copy of the “literary cholera” that was French literature, it should emulate Russian authors; rely on inspiration from folk traditions and the everyday lives of common people in order to create their own, Herderian model of literature: a mirror reflecting the nation’s life.20

Vellianitēs translated one more of Dostoevsky’s short stories in the next decade, ‘The Beggar Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree’ (‘To paidion para to dendron tou Christou’) (‘Elka u Khrista’, 1876) in 1889. However, he had neither the linguistic skills nor the literary depth to undertake the daunting task of translating Dostoevsky’s novels into Greek. That person was Alexandros Papadiamantēs (1851–1911).

Roidēs’s ‘Dostoevsky and his Novel
“Crime and Punishment”’

In 1889, Papadiamantēs, an emergent writer in his thirties, was working as a translator from French and English for Greek periodicals.21 In 1889, he translated Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866) for the newspaper Ephēmeris. The translation was serialised in 106 instalments over four months, published on the front and second page of the newspaper following the format of French newspaper literary supplements (feuilletons).22 The writer and critic, Emmanouēl Roidēs (1836–1904), who worked for Ephēmeris, encouraged the newspapers’ editors to print this translation of Crime and Punishment.

A day prior to its publication, the novel was introduced by Roidēs in an article titled ‘Dostoevsky and his Novel “Crime and Punishment”’, which became a seminal text in the reception of Dostoevsky in Greece.23 Roidēs, an author and critic who had lived and studied in Europe, suggested to the editors of Ephēmeris that they publish Dostoevsky’s novel in order to, as he put it, finally “eradicate the quite widespread belief that literary works are divided into those that can be enjoyed by all and those that are appreciated by few”. Roidēs, echoing the negative reception of French authors by critics of that period, wrote that “if Zola [...] and Maupassant remove from their heroes and heroines the clothes—and sometimes the undergarments—then Dostoevskii removes the skin”. He presented Dostoevsky as an author of universal appeal who had a “gift bestowed by God” to “depict what is felt by everyone but which no one who had come before him, had described as faithfully and clearly”. Drawing parallels to Euripides and Aeschylus, Roidēs identified Dostoevsky as a writer of mythographia (fable-writing), someone who had the power to “accurately interpret the sentiments that are nested in our hearts”. He claimed that the Christian character of Dostoevsky’s works was evident in “the apotheosis of pain, humility, dysmorphia of the body and spiritual bankruptcy”. Finally, Roidēs called on readers to approach Crime and Punishment as a “moral parable”, a work whose moral value was equal to its artistic virtues.

Roidēs’s views on Dostoevsky were of great consequence to Dostoevsky’s reception in Greece.24 Roidēs was already a well-respected writer and critic by the time he provided his preface for the translation of Crime and Punishment. His insights about Dostoevsky’s fiction anticipated major trends in how the author would be understood and studied in the Greek context, drawing parallels to Ancient Greek tragedy, establishing psychological analysis as an integral component of his fiction, employing Dostoevsky’s biography as a tool of literary analysis, and recognising Christian morality as the main tenet of his philosophy. By giving such a strong endorsement of Dostoevsky and his fiction in one of the first Greek-language introductory texts on that author, Roidēs made Dostoevsky valuable in the eyes of nineteenth-century Greek readers. He thus became the first consecrator of Dostoevsky in Greece; he was an author with enough prestige and recognition—symbolic capital—in Greek culture to determine and legitimise Dostoevsky’s literary value.25 As Pascale Casanova has written on the relationship between translation and consecration: “the characterization of a text by a great consecrator as a text ‘that has to be translated’ is enough to consecrate it as a great work of literature”.26

Alexandros Papadiamantēs’s To Enklēma kai ē Timōria

Roidēs might have been a well-known writer when he introduced Crime and Punishment, but the translator of the novel was not, in 1889, yet well-known. Although Crime and Punishment was quite popular with readers of Ephēmeris, its translator was never named, which was usual practice at the time.27 In 1905, Vellianitēs identified him as the writer Alexandros Papadiamantēs.28 Papadiamantēs would later be recognised as Modern Greece’s “national prose-writer”.29 Although little-known beyond Greek borders, at home Papadiamantēs’s novels and short stories are considered a landmark in the development of Greek national literature.30 During his lifetime, Papadiamantēs had minor commercial success as an author and supported himself by translating European literature for newspapers and journals, using his knowledge of English and French.

Papadiamantēs’s Crime and Punishment was entitled To Enklēma kai ē Timōria (The Crime and the Punishment); his addition of definite articles to both nouns mirrored the title of the French translation—Le Crime et le Châtiment, translated by Victor Derély (1884)—obliquely indicating its own indirect source. Derély’s French translation was the intermediate text for many European translations of Crime and Punishment, among them the first translation of the novel in English by Frederick Whishaw published in 1886 by Henry Vizetelly.31 After its serialisation in Ephēmeris, Papadiamantēs’s To Enklēma kai ē Timōria was not republished in book form, making the first translation of Crime and Punishment into Greek unavailable to readers for at least a hundred years. A critical edition of the translation was published for the first time in 1992, when academic interest in Papadiamantēs’s translations rose.32

Once his translation had been reissued, scholars of Papadiamantēs were able to appreciate the author’s idiosyncratic style and the creative liberties he took when translating from the French intermediate.33 Papadiamantēs’s Greek remained faithful to Derély’s text at the macro-textual level. He deviated from the French version with micro-textual level adjustments to the style and register, taking full advantage of Greek intralinguistic variations within the diglossia of Modern Greek.34 Papadiamantēs translated the descriptive parts of the novel in katharevousa, an archaic variant of Modern Greek, and the dialogic parts in demotic, the vernacular form. Within dialogues, he also alternated between higher and lower registers to render the idiolect and the social background of the speaker. The result was a stylistically rich translation reflecting the entire history of the Greek language from Homeric epithets to Modern Greek colloquialisms. In a way, it could be argued that Papadiamantēs intuitively sensed the polyphony of the original, rendering it into a stylistically rich idiolect of Modern Greek. Papadiamantēs would revisit Crime and Punishment almost ten years later in his novella The Murderess, which was inspired by Dostoevsky’s novel.

The Murderess (1903)

For many years, Papadiamantēs’s most widely known connection to Dostoevsky was not his 1889 translation To Enklēma kai ē Timōria , but his novel, The Murderess (Ē Phonissa, 1903), a work strongly influenced by Crime and Punishment. The Murderess follows a series of murders on a small island community in mid-nineteenth-century Greece. The titular murderess is Frankogiannou (named, as was customary in small village societies, after her husband’s surname), a woman in her sixties, who starts murdering infant girls in the firm belief that she is releasing their parents from the economic burden of raising a female child. The realistic depiction of the murderess’s inner turmoil as she commits these crimes, including her attempts to rationalise her actions, led Greek critics to compare The Murderess to Crime and Punishment from the novel’s first publication. They soon characterised Papadiamantēs as “Greece’s Dostoevsky”. The novel’s psychological realism, its treatment of social and moral issues, and Papadiamantēs’s rich language, make it one of the most representative texts of Modern Greek literature, still relevant today.

Comparisons between Dostoevsky’s and Papadiamantēs’s fiction were drawn even before The Murderess was published.35 However, it was in The Murderess that Greek critics and scholars traced Dostoevsky’s direct influence. Beyond the central theme of murder/sin and punishment/redemption shared by both novels, similarities have been noted in the narrative structure—the use of an omniscient third-person narrator—and the authors’ social commentary on the motives for crime.36 Despite these similarities, Papadiamantēs’s The Murderess was not considered an attempt to passively mimic Dostoevsky’s prose style. It was perceived rather as a creative transformation—transcreation—of Dostoevsky’s themes and poetics into the Greek literary tradition. Translating Crime and Punishment was Papadiamantēs’s “intellectual education”, an “incentive” for Papadiamantēs to produce original fiction in Greek.37 The hypothesis that translated foreign literature can function as an accumulation of literary resources with the momentum to transform original literary production proved right in Papadiamantēs’s case.38 That the latter used his translations as a creative exercise for his own fictional writing illustrates how translated literature can “fulfil the need of a younger literature put into use its newly founded (or renovated) tongue for as many literary types as possible in order to make it serviceable as a literary language”.39 The translation of Crime and Punishment by an author at the centre of the Modern Greek canon and its role in inspiring the novel The Murderess—which would become a canonical text of Modern Greek literature—sealed Dostoevsky’s literary fate in Greece from his very first contact with Greek readers. His positive reception in Greece established, Dostoevsky would continue to captivate the interest of Greek readers: albeit in a different socio-historical context, as we shall see next.

Twentieth-century Translations

1900–25: The Impact of the Russian Revolution

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Greek readers’ turn to Russian literature continued to fuel translation production which increased pace with each year. Soon, Russian became the third most translated language, after English and French.40 The Russian Revolution of 1917 gave new momentum to the dissemination of Russian literature in Greece and its reception, profoundly changing reading habits and translated literature production.41 Up until the 1920s, the majority of Greek readers interested in Russian literature were the “socially privileged part of society […] that travelled to study at the [European] capitals”, spoke foreign languages and had access to French or German translations of Russian works.42 After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the KKE (the Communist Party of Greece) in 1922, which laid the foundations for the Communist movement in Greece, Russian literature’s readership expanded to include a new group of readers from the lower-middle class;43 “the student from the countryside with a meagre income, the intellectual young worker overcome by unexpected new aspirations to become a social hero”.44 Authors like Maksim Gorky (doyen of Socialist Realism) gained in popularity, while nineteenth-century Russian authors—among them Dostoevsky—were re-introduced to Greek readers through the lens of Socialist aesthetics.45

The shift in tone in how Russian literature was discussed was evident in Greek critical discourse of that period; the notions of ‘proletariat’ and ‘Socialist Realism’, endowed with positive meaning, entered the vocabulary of critics who discussed Russian authors, even nineteenth-century ones like Dostoevsky. One such example can be found in a 1930 text written by author Nikos Kazantzakēs in his History of Russian Literature, the first book on the subject by a Greek writer.46 Kazantzakēs had long been fascinated by Russian culture. He had visited the country on several occasions and was an early advocate of Socialist and Communist ideology. In the chapter on Dostoevsky, Kazantzakēs described him as a writer who from the very start emerged as ”a visionary of the urban proletariat, the poet of the maniacs, the ridiculous, the scorned and the sick”; he was “a petty-bourgeois, suffering all his life in poverty, sickly, his nervous system struck by any slight change in his soul, a neuropath proletarian of the metropolis”.47 In Dostoevsky’s works, Kazantzakēs noted, the reader did not find the family sagas of the Russian aristocracy which Tolstoy wrote about; instead, his heroes were the “spiritual proletarians that wander in the streets of the great metropolis; who stumble on the border of crime, insanity and hunger”.48 The harsh social reality depicted in Gorky’s and Dostoevsky’s novels provoked “the interest and the sympathy of young people” who saw in their writings a reflection of their own lives.49 The writer and critic Angelos Terzakēs, who lived through that period, describes how young idealists like him “imagined themselves one of Gorky’s or Dostoevsky’s heroes”.50 The connection with Dostoevsky’s work was instant, “a connection of the soul”:

It is impossible for me to describe the emotions of this generation, when they encountered Dostoevsky for the first time. His novels spread throughout Greece to the most isolated village. The connection was instant. A connection of the soul […] We loved him instantly. There is an [reading] audience. It is up to us to come closer to him. He is waiting for us.51

The fact that Russian authors were mostly available in poor-quality translations from French did not deter readers who “avidly consumed badly printed newspapers with translations or hurried summaries of foreign sociological articles, volumes of selected literary works slyly chosen to serve the propaganda [of the movement] but also to serve temporary publishing interests”.52 The rush to print Russian works to keep up with the growing readership is reflected in the lack of order or any coherent plan for producing translations between 1900 and 1925. Although new translations of Dostoevsky’s works—both major and minor—appeared regularly, there was neither a single unified publishing effort to translate the author’s remaining untranslated works, nor were the same translators employed by publishing houses to preserve consistency in translation style. Early twentieth-century translations depended usually on French versions and translators were unaware of previous versions. In 1912, Stelios Charitakēs (the first translator of Crime and Punishment into the demotic variant of Modern Greek), expressed in his translator’s note his disappointment that “Dostoevsky’s works are unknown in Greece”; seemingly, he had no knowledge of either Papadiamantēs’s or Vellianitēs’s existing translations.53 The general dissatisfaction with the quality of Greek translations of Dostoevsky’s works was voiced by writer and translator Petros Pikros in an introduction to the first Greek translation of The House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, 1861) published in 1921.54 While Pikros approved of the “surprisingly warm reception” of Dostoevsky by Greek readers, he was highly critical of available translations in Greek. He criticised translators for using French intermediate translations and denounced any such translation as “lacking” in style and “inadequate” in terms to the original. Tellingly, the translator of the novel was credited only with her initials— ‘Miss A.K.’—and was not mentioned once by Pikros.

Despite the overall positive reception of Russian literature, it was becoming increasingly clear that available translations of Russian works, while sufficiently numerous to satisfy high market demand in the short term (and provide economic profit for publishers), fell short of readers’ literary standards.

Govostēs Editions

The breakthrough in translating Dostoevsky into Greek came in 1926 when twenty-two-year-old Kōstas Govostēs (1904–58) founded the Publishing Company Anatole in Athens, later renamed Govostēs Editions. Govostēs saw himself as a publisher promising to “present something completely new”.55 Govostēs, writing on the reception of Russian literature in Greece, expressed his disapproval with what he saw as opportunism from publishers and editors who sought to profit from readers’ appetite for “everything Russian” and a superficial interest from a large part of the readership.56 Govostēs talked of the complete lack of “translation conscientiousness” by publishers and editors who hired “anyone who knew a couple of French words” and was willing to work for the lowest rates to translate Russian works from intermediate translations; “poor Russians arrived in Greece, some via Berlin, others via Paris; others were collected shipwrecked in Italian waters”.57 As for Greek readers, he distinguished between those who read Russian literature to keep up with literary trends and not appear old-fashioned (“the snobs”); and those like himself, whose interest in Russian culture was genuine and who believed that “Russian thought has influenced to such a great degree humanity’s progress and holds in its hand its historical fate”.58 Govostēs’s target audience would not be the wider public that read to “kill time”, but those who sought a deeper and wider understanding of Russian culture; the sophisticated readers.59

The first book published by Govostēs was Dream of a Ridiculous Man (To oneiro enos geloiou) (‘Son smeshnogo cheloveka’, 1877), “a small masterpiece […] by the greatest Russian writer” translated by Geōrgios Semeriōtēs.60 The translation was to be part of a series on “small masterpieces of World Literature” by authors like Dostoevsky, Maksim Gorky, Alexander Dumas, Henrik Ibsen, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Lev Tolstoy, Luigi Pirandello, Anton Chekhov, and Knut Hamsun. Introducing the edition, Govostēs set his publishing house’s goals and aspirations: to publish “the most beautiful works of World Literature” in “colourful” translations, in well-curated editions and affordable prices in order to “disseminate literature and make it accessible to everyone”.61

Govostēs benefitted from the upsurge in demand for Russian literature in the 1920s.62 His newly founded publishing house filled a gap that existed in Greek publishing for good-quality translations from Russian. Govostēs Editions’s attractive editions and coherent book series satisfied both older readers, accustomed to the standards of European publishing houses, and new readers who sought in his editions an introduction to Russian literature. Besides Russian writing, Govostēs Editions ran a number of book series on philosophy, sociology, and Communism. As part of the ‘Socialist Library’ series, he published works by Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Nikolai Bukharin. For Govostēs, the publication of these texts was “invaluable” and “necessary” at a time “when the communist movement in Greek was still struggling”.63

In 1936, Iōannēs Metaxas, a former army general, became dictator of Greece on the pretext of safeguarding the country from the threat of Communism. In one of its first decrees, Metaxas’s regime outlawed the Communist Party and banned the publication of Communist texts and any work that ran counter to the country’s “national interests”.64 Govostēs was targeted by the regime as a publisher of Communist and Marxist texts. His offices and bookshop were looted, and the books were confiscated and burned in public. Govostēs himself was sentenced to several months in prison.65 When he was released, he realised that for his publishing house to survive under a hostile regime, he needed to change course. He stopped publishing explicitly political texts and shifted his focus towards literary fiction—translated and national. Govostēs Editions now printed novels, poetry collections, and dramas by foreign and Greek authors as well as titles on literary theory and psychology. In 1939, the publishing house became active again. Govostēs’s decision to focus on literature was vindicated; Govostēs Editions quickly recovered and became profitable. By 1950, it was the second most productive publishing house in Athens, having published more than 135 titles in its 24 years of existence.66 Govostēs hired new translators and gathered a team of editors and advisors, spearheaded by the poet Giannēs Ritsos (1909–90), to supervise all manuscript editing and ensure the quality of the final product.67 Govostēs published Ritsos’s poetry collections and maintained a lifelong friendship with the poet, now considered a towering figure of the Greek Left. The inclusion of Ritsos, with his deep linguistic and literary knowledge, showed Govostēs’s care for the quality of translations.

As part of the renewed effort to concentrate on translated literature, Govostēs started publishing the collected works of classic authors such as Fedor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, William Shakespeare, Émile Zola, Oscar Wilde, and many others. He began publishing Dostoevsky’s collected works in 1940 in new translations by Athēna Sarantidē and Koralia Makrē (made directly from Russian). All editions now included on the cover the caption ‘translated from Russian’. By 1944, he had published new translations of The Gambler (O paiktēs) (Igrok, 1867), Notes from Underground (To ypogeio), Netochka Nezvanova (Nietotska Niesvanova) (Netochka Nezvanova, 1849), The Eternal Husband (O aiōnios syzygos) (Vechnii muzh, 1869), and The Humiliated and Insulted (Tapeinōmenoi kai Kataphrōnemenoi) (Unizhennye i oskorblennye, 1861). In 1942, with the addition of Arēs Alexandrou (1922–78), a young Russian-born translator, to the team, Govostēs was able to complete Dostoevsky’s collected works in Greek.

Arēs Alexandrou

Alexandrou was hired on Ritsos’s recommendation; the latter had read and admired Alexandrou’s prior translations from Russian.68 The two men moved in the same political and literary circles, both active members of the Communist Party (Alexandrou had joined the youth section of the party when he graduated). Alexandrou was thus an ideal candidate to fulfil the job of house translator from Russian. His father was an ethnic Russian-Greek from the city of Trabzon on the East Black Sea, and his mother was Russian–Estonian. Alexandrou’s birth name was Aristotelēs Vasileiadēs; his pseudonym, by which he remains best-known, was suggested by the poet Giannēs Ritsos when Alexandrou began translating for Govostēs.69 After the revolution of 1917, the Vasileiadēs family left for Greece where they had relatives since they struggled to make a living under the new Soviet regime. Alexandrou, then six years old, spoke only Russian and had to learn Greek at school. He quickly showed aptitude for languages and literature. Besides Russian, he was fluent in English and French, and had a basic knowledge of Italian and German. In his last years of high school, Alexandrou translated into Greek Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and the novella The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, 1836) as a personal translation challenge. It was Alexandrou’s translation of Eugene Onegin that convinced Ritsos to introduce him to Govostēs.

Alexandrou’s first translation for Govostēs Editions was from English: D.H. Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away (1925), published in Greek in 1944.70 Alexandrou’s name featured on the cover as the translator above that of the author of the introduction, Aldous Huxley. Govostēs’s decision to include Alexandrou’s name on the cover on his first translation was both a sign of support for the young translator and a tacit acknowledgement of translation’s contribution to importing foreign literature into Greece. In the same year, Govostēs published Alexandrou’s first translation of Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (Anamnēseis apo to spiti tōn pethamenōn, 1944), written during the Nazi Occupation (1941–44) of Athens. Alexandrou—who took part in the Resistance against the Nazis—later wrote that he thought of this translation as “an act of resistance”:

I was taking a sort of stand—since this was a Russian novel—against labour camps, like the one the author described and where he had been sent to be punished for harbouring libertarian ideas. Dostoevsky didn’t say this clearly, but the informed reader would pick up on it. Dostoevsky was taking a stand against the authoritarian tsarist regime and by extension I, as his translator, encouraged resistance against the Germans.71

During the Greek Civil War (1946–49) and the politically fraught period that followed—a time of strong anti-Communist sentiment in Greece—Alexandrou spent ten years (1948–58) in exile on island prison camps, where thousands were held by the right-wing postwar government, for his involvement with the Communist Party. Throughout his life, Alexandrou translated many Russian and Soviet authors, including Nikolai Gogol, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Maksim Gorky, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Anna Akhmatova, and others. Alexandrou’s translations of Dostoevsky, written during the years of the Nazi Occupation and between his imprisonments, stand out as one of the most successful translation efforts to introduce the works of a foreign author in Greek. Beginning with The House of the Dead (1944), Govostēs published the following novels in Alexandrou’s translations: Crime and Punishment (Enklēma kai Timōria, 1951–52), Demons (Besy, 1872; Daimonismenoi, 1952–53), The Idiot (Idiot, 1869; O Ēlithios, 1953), and Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1880; Oi Aderphoi Karamazov, 1953–54). Govostēs also published Alexandrou’s translations of shorter works, posthumously (not all Greek publication dates can be established definitively): The Village of Stepanchikovo (Stepnachikogo i ego obitateli, 1859; To chōrio Stepanchikovo), Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846; Oi Phtōchoi), ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (‘Son smeshnogo cheloveka’, 1877; To Oneiro enos geloiou), White Nights (Belye nochi, 1848; Leukes nychtes), and ‘A Gentle Creature’ (‘Krotkaia’, 1876; Mia glykia gynaika).72 Alexandrou, besides his professional career as a translator from Russian, English and French, was an author in his own right; he published poetry collections, dramas, and the novel Mission Box (To Kivōtio, 1974), a semi-allegorical, Kafkaesque novel on the Greek Civil War. It is considered a seminal text of Modern Greek postwar fiction.73

Alexandrou’s translations were promoted by Govostēs Editions as a “restoration” of the Russian text, a major improvement from previous translations that had, in their view, “abused” the Russian original.74 Govostēs implicitly challenged the validity of previous translations, promoting translations from his firm as superior and authentic. “Dostoevskii in our editions is the Real Dostoevskii […]”, always translated from the original by translators like Arēs Alexandrou, he claimed.75 Alexandrou’s biographer also referred to Alexandrou’s translations as “restoring” and “reconstructing” Dostoevsky’s text:

What distinguishes [Alexandrou’s translations] is their faithfulness, neither typical or lexical; it is their faith to the ethos and the spirit of the foreign work […]. True fidelity does not entail solely technical competence and ethos, but something more. What was it in Alexandrou’s case? What I see in his translations is pleasure, or if you will, reconstruction. Unexpectedly, he found a common link between linguistic sense and his own need for creation in this back-and-forth between his mother tongue and his adopted language; from the language he was forced to abandon…76

Alexandrou’s translation work has been described as operating on the principles of “faithfulness to the original and respect to the Greek [text]”.77 Alexandrou himself described his effort to write “the crooked way [Dostoevskii] would have done in Greek, but without being told that it [the translated text] is crooked in Greek”.78 He confessed that:

I used to interfere with the text, for had I left it the way it was, I would have been branded a sloppy translator. I had thus to balance on a tightrope, to intervene on the text in a way that the reader would think that I had altered nothing, and that that was how Dostoevsky himself would have written in Greek; that is, that he would have written neglecting style, piling phrases on paper, as if the text was raw material to be refined later.79

Alexandrou’s success as a translator lies in his ability to render the Russian text in a Greek language that was and still is accessible and familiar to the Greek reader. Alexandrou in his translations chooses to “move the writer towards the reader” and not the reader toward the writer.80 He moves Dostoevsky towards a Greek audience, the Dostoevskian text towards the linguistic expectations of the Greek reader. Another reason for the success of Alexandrou’s translation was the rigorous editing that his text underwent by the editing team Govostēs had gathered, led by Ritsos and Govostēs himself; all translations were read, discussed, and edited to ensure the linguistic coherence of the final product. In many editions, Govostēs included special dedications, where he described the publication of the translations as the result of “collaborative labour”, thanking “invisible collaborators-editors” without whom the completion of this work would have been impossible.81

Together, Govostēs’s publishing and editing decisions in terms of book format and pricing, and Alexandrou’s literary language made Dostoevsky’s works accessible—commercially and linguistically—to the Greek reader at that time. Alexandrou’s translation style, with Govostēs’s effective publishing strategy, combined to gain his translations the status of Greek standard editions. Alexandrou’s literary recognition as an author and poet, which grew posthumously, further enhanced the legitimation and visibility of his translations; he soon eclipsed in popularity all other translators, with the exception of Papadiamantēs, a canonical Modern Greek author by that time. Since then, the majority of Greek readers have been introduced to Dostoevsky’s oeuvre in Alexandrou’s translations by Govostēs Editions. The many reprints of Alexandrou’s translations since their publication in the 1950s are an index of their popularity—commercial and cultural—and of Alexandrou’s visibility as a translator. Characteristic of that visibility is his commemoration in many studies and special volumes on Dostoevsky published in Greek.82

In the back matter of the first edition of Alexandrou’s translation of Brothers Karamazov (1954) that marked the completion of Dostoevsky’s collected works in Greek, Govostēs described the completion of this effort as an undertaking of “immense importance both for the colossal literary value of [Dostoevsky’s] works and its […] dissemination in our language” that “established the undeniable cultural and literary value of Greek translation”.83

Conclusion

If we consider Dostoevsky’s position within the global literary field to be at the centre of the world literature canon, Greek translations of his novels can reveal how the work of this Russian author became World Literature. David Damrosch describes a process of “double refraction, whereby”:

works become world literature by being received into the space of a foreign culture, a space defined in many ways by the host culture’s national tradition and the present needs of its own writers. Even a single work of world literature is the locus of a negotiation between two different cultures.84

Since translation is the point of contact between two cultures, World Literature becomes “writing that gains in translation”.85 The “double refraction” in Damrosch’s definition concerns both the formation of a wider supra-national field and of national literary fields. Within the receiving culture, the study of translation history allows for an examination of how “a culture has changed through contact with another culture”.86 Translations that successfully render a foreign author’s work in the receiving culture’s literary tradition, as I have argued that both Papadiamantēs and Alexandrou accomplished in their domesticating translations of Dostoevsky, have the power to establish the literary value of his work within a national literary field (thus making it a fact of the target culture),87 as well as, cumulatively, within the world literary field.

Given that Modern Greek national literature was at a formative stage when Russian literature was first imported at the end of the nineteenth century, this essay has shown how Russian fiction introduced new themes and a new poetics to the Modern Greek literary field. Translation acted as a force for innovation that provided Modern Greek authors with literary resources; as an “accumulation of literary capital”.88 Papadiamantēs’s The Murderess, written after his translation of Crime and Punishment, testifies to that momentum. Alexandrou’s retranslations, written half a century later, consolidated Dostoevsky’s central position in the Greek canon of foreign literature. Alexandrou’s retranslations “actualized the potential contained” in Dostoevsky’s literary text and helped provide a space for it within Greek culture and language.89 The publisher Govostēs’s decision to prioritise literary over commercial motives in publishing the collected works of Dostoevsky in Greek—evident in his choice of professional translators and editors—added to the literary value of the Greek literary language, further consecrating Dostoevsky in Greek culture.

1 In this article, I have followed Library of Congress transliteration rules for both Modern Greek and Russian with some adjustments for ease of reading. For example, Dostoevsky’s name, if transliterated from its Greek version, would be radically foreignised as Phiontor Dostogiephski. I have therefore chosen to back-translate Dostoevsky from Greek as ‘Dostoevskii’, with minor exceptions (e.g. when transliterating the titles of articles or monographs), and to use Dostoevsky otherwise, as elsewhere in this volume. The publisher Govostēs and his firm Govostēs Editions should technically be transliterated as Gkovostēs; however, on their own international publicity materials, they used both forms inconsistently. I have therefore used ‘Govostēs’ in the main text and ‘Gkovostēs’ only in footnote references.

2 See Lawrence Venuti, ‘Retranslations: The Creation of Value’, Bucknell Review, 47: 1 (2004), 25–38; Françoise Massardier-Kenney, ‘Toward a Rethinking of Retranslation’, Translation Review, 92:1 (2015), 73–85; Piet Van Poucke, ‘Retranslation History and Its Contribution to Translation History: The Case of Russian-Dutch Retranslation’, in Perspectives on Retranslation, ed. by Özlem Berk Albachten and Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 195–211.

3 Anthony Pym, Method for Translation History (Manchester: St Jerome, 1998), p. 79.

4 Pascale Casanova, ‘Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire. La traduction comme échange inégal’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 144 (Sept. 2002), 7–20 (p. 18); Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 51 and p. 224.

5 See Sonia Ilinskagia, Ē rōsikē logotechnia stēn Ellada. 19os aiōnas [Russian Literature in Greece. 19th century] (Athens: Ellēnika Grammata, 2006), p. 27.

6 French romans populaires (‘popular novels’) were long novels often published in serialised form (as feuilletons) intended to appeal to a wide audience. Although they were classified as paraliterature, many authors of romans populaires are now considered canonical, like Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. See Kōnstantinos G. Kasinēs, Vivliographia tōn ellēnikōn metaphraseōn tēs xenēs logotechnias, 1801–1900 [A Bibliography of Greek Translations of Foreign Literature, 1801–1900] (Athens: Syllogos pros Diadosin Ōphelimōn Vivliōn, 2006).

8 Kōnstantinos G. Kasinēs, “Ē neoellēnikē ‘voreiomania’: Ē rēksē me to romantiko parelthon” [‘The Modern Greek “North-mania”. A Rupture with the Romantic Past’], in Synecheies, asynecheies, rēkseis ston ellēniko kosmo (1204–2014: oikonomia, koinōnia, istoria, logotechnia) [Continuities, Discontinuities, Ruptures in the Greek World (1204–2014): Economy, Society, History, Literature], ed. by Kōnstantinos A. Dēmadēs (Athens: European Society of Modern Greek Studies, 2015), pp. 119–38.

9 Ilinskagia, Russian Literature in Greece, p. 43.

10 Ibid.

11 On the French reception of Russian literature and the role of de Vogüé, see also Alexander McCabe, ‘Dostoevsky’s French Reception: From Vogüé, Gide, Shestov and Berdyaev to Marcel, Camus, and Sartre (1880–1959)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013), http://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/4337.

12 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 78 and p. 127.

14 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 127.

15 Akropolis, 24 December 1886, pp. 1–2.

16 Ilinskagia, Russian Literature in Greece, p. 57.

17 Vellianitēs, ‘Synchronos Rōssikē Philologia’, pp. 253–74.

18 Ibid., p. 256.

19 Anna Dialla, ‘Epaneksetazontas tē dichotomia Dysē-Anatolē: ta pollapla prosōpa tēs Rōsias ston ellēniko 19o aiōna’ [‘Re-examining the East-West Dichotomy: The Many Faces of Russia in the Greek 19th Century’], in Ē Ellada tēs Neōterikotētas. Koinōnikē krisē kai ideologika dilēmmata (19os-20os aiōnas) [Greece in Modern Times. Social Crisis and Ideological Dilemmas (19th-20th Century)], ed. by K. Arōnē-Tsichlē, S. Papageōrgiou and A. Patrikiou (Athens: Papazēsēs, 2014), pp. 53–72.

20 Theodoros Vellianitēs, ‘Synchronos Rōssikē Philologia’, p. 256.

21 Phillipos Pappas, ‘Pros Vioporismon: Anaplaisiōnontas ton metaphrastiko kosmo tou Papadiamantē ston ēmerēsio kai periodiko typo’ [‘To Make a Living: Contextualizing Papadiamantēs’s Translations in Newspapers and Journals’], Praktika G’ Diethnous Synedriou gia ton Alexandro Papadiamantē [Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Alexandros Papadiamantēs] (Athens: Domos, 2 (8–7 October 2011)), 329–45.

22 Eugenia Makrygiannē, ‘Epimetro’ [Afterword] in Fedor Dostoevsky, To Enklēma kai ē Timōria, trans. by Alexandros Papadiamantēs (Athens: Ideogramma, 1992), pp. 501–10.

23 Emmanouēl Roidēs, ‘Dostoevsky and His Novel “Crime and Punishment”’, Ephēmeris, 13 April 1889, p. 2 (p. 2). This text was reprinted to introduce the annotated 1992 Ideogramma edition of Papadiamantēs’s translation.

25 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 22.

26 Pascale Casanova, ‘Consécration et accumulation’, p. 18.

27 A few days after publishing the first instalment, Ephēmeris informed readers that it had to reprint the issue due to high demand. Eugenia Makrygiannē, ‘Epimetro’, p. 501.

28 In a footnote under the ‘Dostoevskii’ entry in his translation of Alexander Skabichevskii’s History of Modern Russian Literature [Istoria Noveishei Russkoi Literatury, 1840–1890], Vellianitēs credited Papadiamantēs as the first Greek translator of Crime and Punishment. See A. Skabichevskii, Istoria tēs rōssikēs logotechnias [History of Russian Literature], trans. by Theodōros Vellianitēs (Athens: Vivliothēkē Maraslē, 1905), p. 601.

29 David Ricks, ‘In partibus infidelium: Alexandros Papadiamantēs and Orthodox Disenchantment with the Greek State,’ in The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, & the Uses of the Past (1797–1896), ed. by Roderick Beaton and David Ricks (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), pp. 249–59 (p. 249).

31 See McCabe, ‘Dostoevsky’s French reception’.

33 Nikos Triantaphyllopoulos, review of Fedor Dostoevsky, To Enklēma kai ē Timōria, trans. by Alexandros Papadiamantēs (reprinted 1992), Papadiamantika Tetradia, 2 (1993), 193–203.

34 Greek diglossia was the coexistence of an artificially created ‘purist’ language—the katharevousa—based on Ancient Greek syntax and vocabulary that was used for official and formal purposes; and the demotic, the language of the people (= dēmos), a more colloquial variant used in everyday life. Diglossia lasted for more than a century and was finally abolished in 1976, when the demotic was established as the official language of the state. See Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

35 One of the earliest mentions of Papadiamantēs as ‘the Greek Dostoevskii’ is a notice advertising Papadiamantēs’s upcoming short story Ōch Vasanakia (1894) in the newspaper Akropolis (6 January 1894, p. 2), nine years before the publication of The Murderess in 1903 and just five years after his translation of Crime and Punishment. See Sophia Bora, ‘O Papadiamantēs kai oi anagnōstes tou: zētēmata istorias tēs proslēpsēs tou ergou tou (1879–1961) [‘Papadiamantēs and his Readers: Historical Issues in the Reception of his Work (1879–1961)’] (unpublished doctoral thesis: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2008).

37 Angelos Terzakēs, ‘Ē zoē tōn grammatōn. Epimetro’ [‘The Life of Letters. Afterword’], Neoellēnika Grammata, 30 (26 June 1937), p. 2.

38 Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘The Position of Translated Literature Within the Literary Polysystem’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 192–97; Pascale Casanova, ‘Consécration et accumulation’, pp. 7–20.

39 On Papadiamantēs’s translations as creative exercise, see Stesē Athēnē, ‘O Papadiamantēs Metaphrastēs. Sta entypa tou Vlassē Gavriēlidē’ [‘Papadiamantēs the Translator. In Vlassēs Gavriēlidēs’s Printing Press’], in Praktika G’ Diethnous Synedriou gia ton Alexandro Papadiamantē, II [Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Alexandros Papadiamantēs] (Athens: Domos, 8–7 October 2011), 29–53; Zohar, ‘The Position of Translated Literature’), p. 194.

40 Kōnstantinos G. Kasinēs, Vivliographia tōn ellēnikōn metaphraseōn tēs xenēs logotechnias, 1901–1950 [A Bibliography of Greek Translations of Foreign Literature, 1901–1950] (Athens: Syllogos pros Diadosin Ōphelimon Vivliōn, 2013), p. x.

41 Phillipos Pappas, ‘Logotechnikē metaphrasē kai Aristera: entypa, tomes, repertorio (1901–1950)’ [‘Literary translation and the Left: Publications, Innovations, Repertoire (1901–1950)’], in Zetēmata neoellēnikēs philologias, metrika, yphologika, kritika, metaphrastika [Issues of Modern Greek Philology, Metric, Stylistic, Critical, Translational] (Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2016), 603–11 (p. 605). For more detailed discussion, see Niovi Zampouka’s chapter in this volume.

42 Angelos Terzakēs, ‘Dēmosthenēs Voutyras’, Nea Estia, 190 (15 November 1934), 1015–22 (p. 1015).

43 Giōrgos Michailidēs, ‘Translating Russian Literature in Interwar Greece: The Example of Maxim Gorky’, Syn-Thèses, 6 (2013), 38–57 (p. 42).

44 Terzakēs, ‘Dēmosthenēs Voutyras’, p. 1015.

46 Nikos Kazantzakēs, ‘Theodōros Dostoevskii’ in Kazantzakēs, History of Russian Literature (Athens: Eleutherouthakēs, 1930), pp. 87–98.

47 Ibid., p. 90 and p. 94.

48 Ibid., p. 89.

49 Christina Dounia, Logotechnia kai politikē: Ta periodika tēs Aristeras sto Mesopolemo [Literature and Politics: The Journals of the Left in the Interwar Period] (Athens: Kastaniotēs, 1996), 34.

50 Terzakēs, ‘Dēmosthenēs Voutras’, p. 1015.

51 ‘Ta synchrona provlēmata tēs pneumatikēs mas zōēs’, interview with Angelos Terzakēs in Neoellēnika Grammata, 24 (22 September 1935), p. 3.

52 Ibid.

53 Fedor Dostoevsky, To Enklēma kai ē Timōria [The Crime and the Punishment], trans. by Stelios Charitakēs (Chania: Gorgias Phortsakēs, 1912).

54 Petros Pikros, ‘The Man and the Work “The Deadhouse”’, in Fedor Dostoevsky, Anamnēseis apo to spiti tōn pethamenōn [The House of the Dead], trans. by ‘Miss A.K.’ (Athens: Athēna, 1921), pp. 3–16.

55 Kōstas Govostēs, ‘The Publication of the History of Russian Literature’, in History of Russian Literature, ed. by Louis Léger and trans. by Ad. D. Papadēma (Athens: Gkovostēs Editions, 1929), pp. vii-xi.

56 Govostēs, ‘Publication’, p. vii.

57 Ibid., p. ix.

58 Ibid., p. x.

59 Ibid.

60 Introduction by Kōstas Govostēs to Fedor Dostoevsky, To oneiro enos geloiou [Dream of a Ridiculous Man], trans. by Geōrgios Semeriōtēs (Athens: Anatolē, 1926). No page numbers.

61 Ibid. For studies on book series which responded to European modernism and the commercialisation of ‘high’ literature see, for example, Lise Jaillant, Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

62 Pappas, ‘Logotechnikē metaphrasē kai Aristera’, p. 606.

64 Giannēs Gklavinas, ‘Eph’ oplou “psalidi”: O kratikos mēchanismos epivolēs logokrisias kai to pedio epharmogēs tou tēn periodo tēs Diktatorias tēn Syntagmatarchēn (1967–74) mesa apo to archeio tēs Genikēs Grammateias Typou kai Plērophoriēn’, in Logokrisia stēn Ellada [Censorship in Greece], ed. by Pēnelopē Petsinē and Dēmētrēs Christopoulos (Athens: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Greek Branch, 2016), pp. 167–76 (p. 168).

65 Kēstas Chatziotēs, Vivliopēleia kai ekdotikoi oikoi tēs Ellados [Bookstores and Publishing Houses of Greece], 3 vols (Athens: Municipality of Athens, Cultural Committee, 2000–2006), Ι (2000), pp. 113–17.

66 Kasinēs, Vivliographia (2013), p. xxxiv.

67 ‘The Publishing House Govostēs and its Founder, 1926–2016’, promotional leaflet to commemorate ninety years since Govostēs Editions’s foundation, https://www.govostis.gr/spaw2/uploads/files/timokatalogos_2016%20lres.pdf.

68 Dēmētres Rautopoulos, Arēs Alexandrou o Exoristos [Arēs Alexandrou The Exile] (Athens: Sokolē, 2004), p. 100.

69 Ritsos acted as Alexandrou’s “spiritual father” and mentor throughout the latter’s career. See Giannēs Ritsos, Trochies se diastaurōsē: Epistolika deltaria tēs exorias kai grammata stēn Kaitē Drosou kai ton Arē Alexandrou [Trajectories at Cross-Roads: Epistolary Cards from Exile, and Letters to Kaitē Drosou and Arēs Alexandrou], ed. by Lizy Tsirimōkou (Athens: Agra, 2008), p. 100.

70 D.H. Lawrence, Ē Gynaika poy ephyge me t’ alogo [The Woman Who Rode Away], trans. by Arēs Alexandrou (Athens: Gkovostēs Editions, 1944).

71 Arēs Alexandrou, O Dramatourgos Dostoevskii [Dostoevskii the Dramatist] (Athens: Gkovostēs Editions, 2012), p. 28.

73 Alexis Argyriou, ‘The End of a Vision’, The Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1976, p. 1368.

75 Advertisement by Govostēs in the literary journal Diavazō, 131 (1985), p. 7.

76 Rautopoulos, Arēs Alexandrou o Exoristos, p. 13.

77 Alexandra Iōannidou, ‘Metaphrasē ōs “metempsychōsē”: Arēs Alexandrou-Leo Tolstoy’ [‘Translation as Reincarnation: Arēs Alexandrou-Leo Tolstoy’], The Athens Review of Books (February 2013), 21–25 (p. 22).

78 Alexandra Iōannidou, ‘An Interview with Kaitē Drosou’, Panoptikon, 22 (June 2017), 61–79 (p.73).

79 Arēs Alexandrou, O Dramatourgos Dostoevskii, p. 26.

80 Jeremy Munday, Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 48.

83 See back matter in Dostoevsky, Aderphoi Karamazov [Brothers Karamazov], trans. by Arēs Alexandrou, 4 vols (Athens: Gkovostēs Editions, 1953–54), IV (1954).

84 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 283.

85 Ibid., p. 288.

86 Pym, Method in Translation History, p. 19.

87 Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies—and Beyond (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995), p. 29.

88 Pascale Casanova, ‘Consécration et accumulation’, p. 19.

89 Françoise Massardier-Kenney, ‘Toward a Rethinking of Retranslation’, Translation Review, 92:1 (2015), 73–85 (p. 73, p. 78).

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