A little time with Constance

 

It's a long weekend and officially the start of the ski season, and right on cue we got our first soaking storm of the winter bringing snow to the mountains and cold sleety rain lower down.

Impossible to do anything outside so yesterday I spent a little bit of time trying to tease out the relationships  of the translators of Russian literature in 1890s England.

Mostly women, they clustered around Sergei Stepniak and Feliks Volkhovski who were prominent Russian exiles living in various parts of London, for example Stepniak lived on Woodstock Road in Bedford Park, and through the Russian exile community they became associated with both the Friends of Russian Freedom, a group that smuggled banned books and papers into tsarist Russia.

Unlike Ethel Voynich, who was also a member of the group, neither Constance, or her sister in law Olive, had any prior knowledge of Russian before being introduced to Stepniak and Volkhoviski, and were both taught Russian by Volkhovski.

Constance, who had previously studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge in the early 1880s, took to Russian like a duck to water, and went on to produce translations of almost all the Russian literature.

Most photographs of Constance show her as an old lady, but the one above, from her student days, show someone who was clearly a determined and attractive young woman.

Both Constance and her sister in law Olive seem to have been attracted to the charismatic Stepniak, Olive cutting off all her hair in anguish when Sergei was killed crossing a level crossing in Hampstead a few days before Christmas 1895

However there's no real hint of a sexual relationship between Stepniak and either Constance or Olive.

Stepniak appears to have been devoted to his wife, Fanya, and after his death Fanya worked with Constance on her translations.

On the other hand Volkhovski seems to have been a bit handsy and the women exchanged letters joking about how, even in his later years when he had grown fat and unattractive Volkhovski still tried it on.

Strangely, unlike the other women in the group who had spent time in Russia working as governesses while perfecting their Russian, Constance never did - perhaps her experience of working as a governess after graduation  made her reluctant as did her marriage in 1889 to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader.

She did visit Russia twice in the years before the 1917 revolutions, but never learned to speak Russian fluently, although, perhaps in part due to her training as a classicist, she could read and parse Russian prose on the fly, no easy task (I remember these dread translation exercises where someone would read a passage from a book and you would try and write down a simultaneous translation, and the the group would critique your attempts).

In researching her life I've developed an admiration for her abilities, something even newer translators of Russian literature acknowledge ...