DOSTOEVSKY, Fyodor; GARNETT, Constance (trans.).

£20,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Novels: First editions of Heinemann's entire Novels of Dostoevsky, scarce as a complete run. Several texts appeared in English for the first time in this series, including The Possessed (now typically translated as Demons), The Double and An Honest Thief. Garnett was the gateway to Russian literature for much of the 20th-century anglophone world, and her work remains in print today. Garnett (1861-1946) and her husband, the editor and book reviewer Edward William, hosted several Russian exiles during the 1890s at their home in Surrey. The writer and journalist F. V. Volkhovsky encouraged Garnett, who had studied classical languages at Newnham College, Cambridge, to learn and translate Russian. Heinemann began to publish her translations in 1894, but the Novels of Dostoevsky was her first commercial success: it "provoked a literary craze" (ODNB) and popularized Dostoevsky in Britain. During an 1894 trip to Moscow, Garnett met Tolstoy, who praised her translation of his work and encouraged her to attempt others. Other literary figures concurred: Joesph Conrad considered her translations of Turgenev as "a great musician interpreting a great composer" (ODNB) and D. H. Lawrence, who visited the Garnetts, "recognized in her constant, rapid, all-absorbing work the mark of the true writer" (Heilbrun, p. 164). In 1921, Katherine Mansfield wrote to her saying "I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other world that you have revealed to us through those marvellous

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