Leo Tolstoy has had a massive influence on world literature. He is acknowledged as one of the greatest novelist of all times, if not the greatest, and his writings have influenced novelists and short stories writers not only in Europe but all over the world. To most of the world, he was introduced when his works were translated into English language.
By the end of the nineteenth century, English had become a language that was understood not only in its mother country but also the colonies that the British had occupied. French, Spanish and probably German were the other three languages that stood a poor second, third and fourth in the linguistic race to conquer the world.
When Saturday Review published these translations around 1905, the admiration of Henry James who had something to do with the paper indemnified Tolstoy’s reputation as a writer. Perhaps the first major English writer to be fully awed by Russian literature, Henry James was initially an admirer of Turgenev when he was translated into English. One of James protégés, H.G Wells, then read everything in translation that Tolstoy wrote and penned a fan letter to him as well.
But it was a long journey because Tolstoy was first translated into English language by Clara Bell who had tackled the translation of Anna Karenina. She was a linguist and had translated it from the French rather than the original Russian. Turgenev had been translated earlier by the French and that paved the way to satiate the curiosity of greater acquaintance with Russian literature among the literati of Europe.
Since Bell’s translation was from French, it was not able to capture the true spirit of the language. Thus Tolstoy did not leave a favourable impression that was to transform the literary landscape of Europe, and through that channel the rest of the world, a little later.
The Russians were greatly influenced by the French. The ideas of revolution and then the Napoleonic wars bought the French ideas, values, etiquettes and mannerism to Moscow, and the Russian elite started to emulate them. The Decembrists were all infatuated by the ideals of the French revolution; they wanted Russia to modernise and become a republic on the same lines. It is not surprising then that Russian literature was initially translated into French and not English; probably the first one to catch the fancy of the translators and the publishers was Turgenev. He was very urbane and his measured prose slipped easily into English. Tolstoy’s prolixity, and unpolished, more uncompromising and altogether more Russian prose, deterred translators.
Nobody had heard of Tolstoy outside of Russia and the first translation in English was of the Cossacks by Eugene Schuyler in 1878. He, an American serving as the Consul in the US Embassy in Moscow, also met Tolstoy. Another American Nathan Haskell Doe also translated Anna Karenina in 1886 from the Russian original text but it was not always apparent and did not make the intended impact. "The geological subsidence of a layer of Russian into a substratum of English leaving a number of words to linger fossil like amid the latter in untranslatable durability", is how The New York Times put it.
It was politics that made Tolstoy acceptable to the English speaking world. His A Confession and What I Believe made greater initial impression and The Kingdom of God is Within You was read large and wide around the world by the likes of Francis Younghusband in Northern India and by M. K. Gandhi in South Africa.
Since the writings expressed unconventional views, and were seen as against censorship and Tsarist state violence, these were espoused by the liberals in the Europe. These translations were by Constance Garrnet, a remarkable woman who would play a key role in popularising Tolstoy as a novelist. She had graduated in classics from Cambridge and was brought closer to the world of letters by her editor/critic husband Edward Garnett. She also got to know Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and Bernard Shaw who constantly interacted with the Russia émigré living in Kent/Surrey border.
She learnt Russian from revolutionaries in exile, Felix Volkhovsky and Sergei Stepniak, and first translated Ivan Goncharov’s A Common Story. Garnett turned to The Kingdom of God is Within You and went to Russia to meet Tolstoy. She was emboldened after the meeting to translate Anna Karenina published in 1901, and then made her second trip to Russia in 1904 after completing War and Peace.
Another translator who made a great impression was Louise Maud. The first English translation of Resurrection was entrusted to her. She with her husband Aylmer Maud then took to translating Tolstoy, she his fiction and he the other works. Besides others, Aylmer Maud had translated What is Art.
The translations of Anna Karenina and War and Peace have been seen as Louise Maud’s towering achievements. These published versions did not come out before 1918 and 1922. The Mauds had started to campaign for a translation of the complete works of Tolstoy and these 21 volumes were launched in 1928 on the centenary of Tolstoy’s birth. A Soviet translation of 90 volumes of the complete works of Tolstoy’s "Collected Works" was also launched the same year.
It was only in the 1950s that new translations were commissioned while the more recent ones have caused controversies -- either by resisting the earlier temptation of smoothing over the rough edges or by upgrading his classic nineteenth century Russian.
European literature, as indeed the literature of other languages, too, was introduced to India through the English translations. Whatever the people knew was through translations because very few knew languages other than English which they had struggled to learn after much qualms. Translations became big enterprise as publishers and literati started to think of the quality of translation itself.
Despite the brilliance of Russian literature, it was not the language of the colonisers. The same can be said about the German language in India at least. Russia after the revolution had become a kind of a beacon light for the oppressed peoples of the world, and everything Russia was taken to heart. Tolstoy and other writers were loved and admired in Russia; so people also started to love and emulate them. This is not to say that the literature that they created was not great but these other factors were instrumental in establishing the above reproach standard to the Russian prose and fiction.