Bluestocking Oxford

By Shelly Foreshaw Brookes

As the final scene of the play closed, scattered applause filled the room, soon interrupted by a woman’s clear voice: “Bravo! Bravo! Author!”. Though it was only a dress rehearsal of Don Juan, her cry carried a strange sincerity. The audience, caught by the moment’s charm, took up the chant, “Author! Author!”

From the wings emerged Director Nikolay Akimov, his bow deliberate, his gesture towards the front row unmistakable. A woman stood—frail, in a plain black dress. The room surged with excitement as she approached the stage, her movements purposeful but strained. Applause thundered, then fell abruptly silent as she reached the center. There, under the theatre’s harsh lights, the author of the play, Tatiana Gnedich crumpled to the floor—a heart attack.

Tatiana Grigorievna Gnedich, whose name is faintly whispered through the annals of Russian literature, would be remembered not just for her translation of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, but for the astonishing story of its creation: a tale of endurance, defiance, and artistry forged under the shadow of Stalinist repression.

As a graduate student of seventeenth-century English literature at the University of Leningrad, Gnedich was accused by various university members of both flaunting and making up her noble lineage and at the same time concealing it. The absurd and contradictory accusations, which evoke the surrealism of Bulgakov and the gallows humor of Hašek, ultimately led to her exoneration. Yet, the affair reflects the broader atmosphere of suspicion and purges under Stalin’s regime.

The atmosphere of distrust was so pervasive that, after being interrogated, Gnedich began to suspect herself of treasonous behaviour. Inspired by her intense studies of British literary history, she had at one point considered the idea of leaving for the island. In hindsight, she interpreted this interest as engagement in possibly disloyal and subversive activities, leading her to confess her perceived guilt to the authorities.

After having denounced herself, Gnedich was arrested on December 27, 1944, and sentenced to ten years in a corrective labour camp on the charge of “treason to the Soviet motherland (intentions not realized)”.

In her holding cell, the guard had handed her the form used during the interrogation, on the back of which, in the smallest letters, the prisoner subsequently scribbled down the first few hundred stanzas of Lord Byron’s Don Juan which she knew by heart. Upon confiscating and reading it, the guard heartily exclaimed that for this she should be awarded the Stalin Prize!

He offered to prescribe two years of solitary confinement in Leningrad before sending Gnedich to the actual labour camp. Upon her request he provided her with paper, Byron’s complete works, and an English dictionary.

Gnedich had completed a full draft after fourteen months and, surprisingly, was allowed to keep the finished transcript. She spent her remaining years in a Siberian camp perfecting it while working mainly in the prison library, as she was unfit for physical labour.

It was there then, in the dim confines of a prison cell, that Gnedich performed what can be understood as an act of intellectual defiance against the regime. It is said that Gnedich knew two cantos, each containing around one hundred stanzas consisting of fourteen lines, meaning she knew over two thousand lines by heart. In her holding cell, she transcribed these stanzas from English into Russian.

By the time Gnedich was ultimately imprisoned, her style and approach as a translator had already been firmly established. Her intellectual contributions were rooted in a broader literary and artistic tradition linked to the Acmeist Movement, which was steadily gaining traction among the Russian intelligentsia. The Acmeist approach to translation with its concern for clarity, precision, and the aesthetic quality of language, finds a noteworthy example in Gnedich’s work, particularly in her translation of Byron.

Critics have long praised her translation for its ability to convey the sharp wit and eroticism of Byron’s own verse. Impressively, Gnedich’s Don Juan is not only a faithful rendering of the story and stylistically elegant but also manages to uphold the same rhyme scheme in Russian as set in its English version. Russian literary critics have repeatedly ranked her work amongst the major achievements of Russian literature, noting its “brilliant acuity and aesthetic clarity.”

The mere existence of the translator, whose task was to preserve the classical works of world literature, was seen as a challenge to the Soviet regime. The values embodied in these works transcended explicit political or class-based frameworks, opposing the ideologically driven narratives endorsed by the regime and the socialist realist art that was expected to be produced. The translator’s work itself was by implication, even if not explicitly intended as such, a sort of denunciation of the heroism that was only supposed to appear in a collective and united form in the socialist state and went against the moral education that Stalin’s regime was aiming to establish. By focusing on one person’s genius and bringing the more universal values found in the classical works to a Russian speaking audience, the translator inherently stood in opposition to the state.

Her intellectual and professional contributions did not end with her work as a translator and extended far beyond the walls of her prison cell. As a teacher, scholar and educator she fostered a generation of Russian intellectuals who, in their turn, and independent from Gnedich, continued to create literary works, some of which grappled with the tensions between state censorship and artistic freedom.

Gnedich is not known to have openly expressed animosity against the state; rather, the rebellion evident in her work seems to stem from the inherently transgressive nature of the act of translation.

In the end, Tatiana Gnedich’s translation of Don Juan was more than simply a work of great literary accomplishment; it was an act of survival and self-preservation as much as an assertion of her intellectual autonomy, and a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit in the face of oppression and hardship. Her story is one that speaks to the capacity of literature and art to transcend political and personal suffering—and to the impressive feats that can arise from simple acts of creativity.

Her translation of the poem sold one hundred thousand copies when it was published in the late fifties and remained the only official Russian version well into the nineteen eighties.

References

Brian James Baer, ‘Gulag translations and Cold War antinomies: Notes for a reflexive Translation Studies’, STRIDON Studies in Translating and Interpreting (2021), 1:1, pp. 9-32.

—‘Literary Translation and the Construction of a Soviet Intelligentsia’, The Massachusetts Review (2006), 47:3, pp. 537-560.

Neil L. Kunze, ‘The Origins of Modern Social Legislation: The Henrician Poor Law of 1536’, Albion: A Quarterly Concerned with British Studies (1971), 3:1, pp. 9-20.

Nina Diakonova, ‘Byron as Hero of a Dramatic Episode in Russian History’, The Messolonghi Byron Society, https://www.messolonghibyronsociety.gr/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Byron-as-Hero-of-a-Dramatic-Episode-in-Russian-History.pdf

Efim Etkind, ‘The Translator’, The Massachusetts Review (2015), 56:1, pp. 139-147.