Translation: “I Just Couldn’t Help Myself” by Leo Tolstoy

This is my first attempt at translating a complete prose piece longer than a page. It is a story by the later Tolstoy, “Nechayanno”, detailing and comparing two moments in the lives of two separate families living in a single building. For classes in my first year at uni I had to do some translation, but it was never complete texts. Anyway, since my work was always rushed out either for deadlines or the exam itself, I never had a chance to truly take care over the translation and editing. Which isn’t to say that this is perfect, but at least that I’ve put some time and effort into it. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find an English translation anywhere online, but the original can be read here: https://rvb.ru/tolstoy/01text/vol_14/01text/0317.htm

Have a read of my translation and let me know what you think in the comments. My comments on the challenges of the process of bringing the story into English, and on the text itself, are underneath.

I just couldn’t help myself, Chance, Bad luck, An Accident, Misfortune[1]

He returned after five in the morning and went through, as was his custom, into his dressing room. But instead of getting undressed he sat – collapsed – into his armchair, with his arms falling upon his knees. He sat there like that, completely motionlessly, maybe for five minutes, maybe ten, or maybe for a whole hour – he didn’t know.

The seven of hearts – just like that he was crushed! – and he saw in the mirror his terrible, unshaking face, which somehow still shined with self-satisfaction.

“Oh, devil take them all!” He said loudly.

There was a rustling behind the door. Then his wife, a beautiful and energetic brunette with sparkling eyes, entered in her nightcap and dressing gown with a broach on it and felt green slippers.

 “What’s happened?” She said plainly. But when she saw his face, she cried out again. “What’s happened? Misha! What’s happened?”

“What’s happened is, well, that I’ve fallen again.”

“You were gambling?”

“Yes.”

“Well, and so what?”

“So what?” He looked at her with a mixture of pleasure and malice[2] and carried on: “I have fallen, I’m dead! It’s all over.” And he gave a sob, trying to hold back his tears.

“Just how many times have I asked? Have I begged?”

She pitied him, but she pitied herself still more. Both because she knew there would be privations to put up with, and because she herself hadn’t slept all night, tormented by terrible thoughts as she waited for him. “It’s already five in the morning.” She thought, glancing at the clock upon the sideboard. – Well, you torturer, how much?”

He waved both of his hands around his head.

“All of it! No, not all of it, but more than that: everything I own, everything to my name. Go on and hit me for it. Do whatever you want to me. I’m dead now,” And he hid his face with his hands. “And I don’t know anything else!”

“Misha, Misha, listen to me for a moment. Pity me too – I’m a person just like you, and I didn’t sleep all night long. I waited for you, worked myself up with anxiety, and this is my reward. At least tell me what it was. How much?”

“So much that I can’t… that nobody can pay it. All sixteen thousand. Everything is over. I have to flee, but how…?”

He looked at her, and though he expected nothing of her at all, she drew him to herself. “How good she is.” He thought, and he took her by the hand. But as soon as he did she pushed him away.

“Misha, well, tell me the truth, how could you do this?”

“I wanted to win it all back…” He took out a cigar and greedily started to smoke. “Yes, of course… I am a bastard, I don’t deserve you. Get rid of me. Forgive me a final time, and I will go away – I’ll disappear. Katya, I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t. It was like I was dreaming, and then I just couldn’t help myself.” He started to squint. “But what can I do now? I’m already dead. But please forgive me, you at least.” And once more he tried to embrace her, but she angrily drew away from him.

“God, these pitiful men. They try to look all brave while things are going well, but the moment things take a turn for the worse it’s depression and uselessness all the way.”

She sat down on the other side of his washing table.

“Tell me how it happened.”

And he told her. He told her how he was taking his money to the bank and bumped into Nekrasov. Nekrasov suggested they go back to his and have a game. And they played, and he lost, and now he had decided to put an end to everything and himself too. He said that he had decided to put an end to everything, but she saw that in fact he had decided nothing, and was deeply depressed and ready to do anything.

She listened to him and, when he had finished, said: “All this is stupid, disgusting: how could you fail to stop yourself? This is cretinism, pure and simple.”

“Swear at me, do whatever you want to me.”

“Well, I don’t want to swear. I want to save you, just I have always saved you, no matter how disgusting and pitiful you’ve seemed to me.”

“Go on, go on. You’ve barely gotten started with the insults.”

“Look here, listen. Do you have any idea how base you are? How mercilessly you torment me? I am ill… Today I was taking even more of the stuff… and now this “surprise”. How powerless I feel.  And you say, what do we do? It’s very simple what we do. Right at this very moment – it’s six o’clock – go to Frim and tell him about it.”

“Will Frim really give a damn? I can’t tell him.”

“Oh, how stupid you are sometimes. Do you really think that I’m suggesting you tell the director of the bank that you lost the money they gave you – on trust! – in a game of cards? Tell him that you went to Nikolaevskii Station… No… it’s better go to the police right away. Wait a minute… not now, but in the morning at ten o’clock. You were going along Nechaevskii Lane when two people attacked you. One had a beard, the other was almost a boy. One was with a Browning and they took your money. After the police you need to go immediately Frim and say exactly the same thing.”

“Yes, but after all…” And he lit up a cigarette now. “What if they learned the truth from Nekrasov himself?”

“I will go to Nekrasov. I will tell him what’s happening. I’ll get it done.”

Misha began to calm down, and when it was 8 o’clock he fell asleep like a dead man. And then at ten she woke him.

…

This all happened early in the morning on the upper floor. And on the lower one, in the home of the Ostrovskys, at eight in the evening the following took place.

They had only just finished dinner. The young mother, princess Ostrovskaya, called over a servant, who had already served them all of the orange-jelly pie[3], and asked for a clean plate and, having placed on it a portion of the jelly, she turned to her children. There were two of them: the elder was a boy of seven, Voka, and the younger was a girl of four and a half, Tanya[4]. Both of them were very beautiful children. Voka was a serious, healthy and quiet boy with a charming smile which proudly presented his uneven, jumbled teeth; Tanya was a dark-eyed, talkative, quick and energetic little joker who always entertained with her constant cheeriness and affection towards everyone.

“Now, my dears, who will bring the pie to nanny?”

“I will,” Pronounced Voka.

“Me, me, me, me, me, me!” Started to cry out Tanya, racing down from her seat.

“No – who spoke first? Voka. Here, take it,” Said the father, who was always spoiling Tanya and for that reason was always glad for a reason to rectify the balance. “And you, Tanya,” He said to his favourite, “Let your brother have his turn.”

“I’m always glad to let Voka go. Go on, Voka, take it. I don’t mind giving him the chance.” Usually the children said their thanks after dinner. The parents drank their coffee and awaited the return of Voka. But for some reason he hadn’t come back.

“Tanya, run off into the children’s room and see why Voka hasn’t returned.”

Tanya jumped off her seat, brushing against her spoon and knocking it onto the floor. She picked it up and laid it on the edge of the table, where it soon fell again. She was dying of laughter as she picked it up once more, getting her leggings all messed up, then she flew into the corridor and then to the children’s room, at the far end of which there was the door to their nanny’s bedroom. She would have rushed through the children’s room, but suddenly she heard the sounds of sobbing behind her. She looked round. Voka was standing near his bed and, looking at the rocking horse, he carried the plate in his hands as he cried bitterly. On the plate there was not a crumb left.

“Voka, what’s up? Voka, what’s happened to the pie?”

“I… I… I… ate it as I walked. I just couldn’t help myself. I’m not going… anywhere… I’m not going. Tanya, I… really, it was an accident… I ate it all… at the beginning just a little, then all of it.”

“Well, what are we to do?”

“I just couldn’t help myself…”

Tanya fell into deep thought, while Voka burst into tears and wept. Suddenly everything became clear to her.

“Voka, here’s what we’ll do. You stop crying and go instead to nanny and tell her that you, without meaning to… well and say sorry too… and tomorrow we’ll give her both of our slices. She’s kind and will understand.”

Voka’s sobbing stopped, and he wiped away his tears with both his palm and the back of his hand.

“But how do I say it?” He said with a trembling voice.

“Well, let’s go in together.”

And they went, and when they returned they were happy and cheery. And happy and cheery, too, were their nanny and parents, when the nanny, laughing and touched, told them the whole story.

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A little bit about the translation

I chose Tolstoy as the first person to translate because, contrary to the size of his reputation, he’s actually a very easy writer to understand for a Russian learner. His sentences are perfectly formed, if long (I had to cut down a number of them here, and rearrange still others), and his vocabulary is rarely exceedingly complex.  Anna Karenina was for me, even though it was in Russian, a literal page turner. His style is fantastic because its virtuosity is in never getting in the way of the story yet at the same time managing to heighten every moment of it. Other great writers are great because of their content; many are great for their style; but to me Tolstoy is one of the best examples of a writer who synthesises style and content in the 19^th century, before content moved predominantly into the characters themselves, and style had to morph to cope.

Other than Tolstoy, I might have done some Chekhov or Turgenev, both of whom are also good at writing well. Dostoevsky, who is my favourite Russian prose writer, is nonetheless pretty awful at writing, and I am not comfortable trying to translate him just yet. Writers of the 20^th Century I find more challenging to read and translate not only because they tend to be more introspective, but also because their works tend to be more cluttered with realia, and my vocab isn’t quite up to it. Furthermore, there is the danger of copyright, which stops me from translating someone like Ivan Bunin until I’ve read all of the rules properly.

In the footnotes I commented on a few things that were tricky. Really the hardest thing is making something that sounds good in English. I made the translation last week, and then came back once I’d had a break so that I could edit it with fresh eyes. Sentences need to be cut, words need to be shifted around. And all the time I feel conscious of every little change I make as though it’s a sin before the great old man and his craft. I did my best though, and for a first attempt, I hope it sounds alright.

A Few Words of Analysis

The story comes from the late Tolstoy. What that means is that it comes from a man now deeply concerned about the moral issues of his time, and about education. Both of these come from a religious conversation that took place as he was finishing Anna Karenina and left him a deeply devout radical Christian. Art, suddenly, had to have a clear message, and the two-part structure of the story is one way in which he, relatively painlessly for once, hints at this message he wants to convey. But what is the message? It’s best to take a look at each part in turn.

The first part details the return home of Misha after a night spent gambling. Gambling always seems to play a big role in Russian fiction of the 19^th Century, and it famously inspired and in some cases forced the creation of some of Dostoevsky’s best fiction. Tolstoy himself squandered his entire inheritance on gambling while he was in the military, so he too knew a thing or two about it. Misha is a man in crisis. He has no direction in life without his money, and can think only of fleeing his guilt. This isn’t even the first time, but now the mistakes have piled up too high. He refers to himself as a dead man, and there is an undercurrent of suicidal thought throughout his thoughts and words.

At first his wife seems like a good character to his bad one. She arrives, she disapproves, but she forgives him, in a way, and tries to help. But her help is only more deceit and danger – it is lying to the bank, and making up a story about thieves. Though she loves him, what she proposes is not a good resolution to the problem. It is trying to make a right with two wrongs.

There are a number of indications that both husband and wife are to be disapproved of here, some of them ridiculous and Tolstoyan, while others are a little more sensible. Gambling, of course, is a sin, and for that Misha has done badly. He lives without faith, so he doesn’t know what to do with himself now that he’s in trouble. He smokes too – one of Tolstoy’s greatest demands of himself when he became seriously Christian was that he quit the habit. His wife is ill and taking medicine without success. Anna Karenina, once she had fallen in the eyes of society (and Tolstoy), also developed an illness that required medication. What Tolstoy wants to show by this, however, is that medicine will never be enough to help someone who is morally fallen, as both of the characters here are. They need faith.

The second part, detailing a minor incident in the life of an aristocratic family, is shorter, and in a way simpler. It mirrors the first in that like the first part it focuses on a man in a state of despair being found by a woman who proposes a solution. Like Misha, Voka makes a mistake when he eats the pie intended for his nanny, and like Misha he suffers for his guilt. Yet there is a key difference between the two incidents, and it is not one of scale, but rather of response. Voka is found by Tanya in a state of despair, and she suggests to him a way of dealing with the problem. They will tell the truth, and try to make amends by giving away their pie tomorrow. Unlike Misha and his wife, who try to save themselves by telling lies, and hoping to avoid the consequences, here Voka accepts his punishment and atones for it.

Unlike with the first part, where we can only guess at the result of the lie, here we know what happens to the children. The adults laugh about their story and are touched – they forgive them. In short, Tolstoy seems to suggest that telling the truth is the best course of action, and the mark of a happy and morally healthy family. (It’s noticeable, also, that in the first part there is no indication that the couple have children.)

There is more to it than that, and more angles to come at it from, but that’s what I’m taking away from it. As always, the thing that I do think is absolutely amazing with Tolstoy is the way that I feel I could carry the story on in my head. These characters, sketched out in a few scant paragraphs, already seem real, living beings to me, independent of the text that contains them. Nobody else does it as well as him. It’s a funny little story, overall, with much more to say than its small size would seem to indicate. We don’t always have control over our actions, but we always have control over how we deal with their consequences. It makes us reflect on that, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

Let me know what you think of the translation, or of the story, below.

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[1] The Russian word “Nechayanno”/Нечаянно can usually be translated simply as “unintentionally”. It is related to the word “чуять”, which means “to scent”, in that both of them are related to sensing. Nechayanno means without being fully conscious, then. I initially wanted something like “by accident” or “a mistake” to be the title, but as will become clear, the word is used in different ways in the story, and no single English word would have been adequate. Hence the phrase.

[2] The Russian word “Zloradstvo” doesn’t have a single word equivalent, funnily enough. It combines both Evil “Zlo” and gladness “Rad”

[3] Food is always hard to translate, since there is often both a cultural barrier and a historical one to overcome.

[4] Tanechka, actually, on account of her diminutive size. I decided to keep the name more familiar in an English context. I have not been able to find out where in the world the name Voka comes from. Rather confusingly, if not also amusingly, most attempts to write вока in Google just lead to information about woks.