Fumée

The third of the author’s novels to be translated, this biting satire of the Russian bourgeoisie is set in the spa town of Baden-Baden, where fashionable and eccentric society could be found around 1860. It had first appeared in the original Russian earlier that year in Le Messager russe. It was to be published the same year in Moscow by Salaëv, but Turgenev met with a refusal after right-thinking nationalist readers, unable to bear the attacks on their own caste, expressed their disapproval: “Hardly anyone likes the novel. And imagine, I don’t care in the least, and I wouldn’t give a fig for your approval. Imagine, I am certain that it is the only relevant and useful thing I have ever written,” he retorted to his publisher.

He then turned to France to have his text published there, entrusting the translation to Prince Augustin Galitzin (or Golitsyne), a Gallicized, Catholic Russian affiliated with the Society of Jesus and also a shareholder in the journal Le Correspondant.

Galitzin produced a truncated first version, published in three installments between July and October 1867 in Le Correspondant, which Prosper Mérimée was supposed to supervise and revise before publication. This did not happen, and Prince Golitsyne ultimately paid no attention to their advice: “Turgenev is in despair. He had his latest novel translated by a Prince Galitzin, who turns out not to know Russian and not to know French particularly well either. […] I spend my time correcting the proofs; Galitzin removes the slightly risqué passages and I restore them. I don’t know which of us will win, but I do hope to scandalize the dowagers who read Le Correspondant.”

Turgenev, horrified by these absurdities and cuts, could only lament the translator’s evident incompetence, compounded by an equally strong impulse toward censorship. He then turned to the publisher Jules Hetzel, with whom he was in contact from October 1867 and who assured him he could publish the text in book form; he then embarked with Mérimée on a marathon of corrections and proofreading.

The book appeared in March 1868, with no translator named. This would not happen again: from then on, Turgenev personally supervised every translation of his books.

A fine copy in wrappers, a rare condition.

Vladimir Boutchik, Bibliographie des œuvres littéraires russes traduites en français, 58.