“May Russia Find Her Thoughts Faithfully Translated”: E. M. de Vogüé’s Importation of Russian Literature into France

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé is widely known as a critic and cultural ambassador who, with the publication of his essays on Russian literature in Le roman russe (1886), popularized the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky, fanning the flames of the epoch’s “Russian fever.” In this chapter I emphasize de Vogüé’s work as a translator and translation theorist. His essays on translation, which appear in his longer critiques as well as in his reviews of and prefaces to translated Russian works, unearth a paradox: the very quality he eulogized in Russian novels—the language of moral suffering—he judged impossible to translate. The second half of the chapter explores how de Vogüé resolves to foster understanding for characters whose moral or spiritual constitution defies translation. In his own translations, which include all the quotations in Le Roman russe and a short story by Tolstoy, de Vogüé endeavours to cultivate compassion for characters (and authors) who are, at times, too foreign to pity. Ultimately, I argue that de Vogüé’s project (to restore the spiritual life of the French literary tradition) was accomplished not through his literary criticism but through his translations.