Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

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Note on Translations and Abbreviations

Nietzsche’s writings:

The English translations of Nietzsche’s works are from the Cambridge Edition. An exception is made for Duncan Large’s translation of Twilight of the Idols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) which seems to me to be more faithful to the original text. Nietzsche’s works are cited by abbreviation, chapter (when applicable) and section number.

Nietzsche’s late posthumous fragments have not yet been fully translated into English. Some of them are collected in the following works: Writings from the Late Notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). I have directly translated from German those posthumous fragments not included in the aforementioned works. The abbreviation PF refers to “Posthumous Fragments”. I specify the reference number of every posthumous fragment quoted (as in the KGW [=Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe] or KSA [=Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe] editions) and the estimated period of composition (Colli and Montinari’s chronology).

Nietzsche’s letters as well have been only partially translated into English. The following editions are available: Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969); Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1921). I have directly translated from German those letters which are not included in the aforementioned works. In the KGB [=Briefwechsel, Kritische Gesamtausgabe] or KSB [=Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe] editions, Nietzsche’s letters are always marked with a number. When I quote a letter, I use the symbol # plus the reference number of the letter.

When necessary, I have partially rectified or modified the translations following the Digital Critical Edition of the Complete Works and Letters of Nietzsche edited by Paolo D’Iorio. See Nietzsche Source: <http://www.nietzschesource.org> ← 11 | 12 →

The abbreviations used are the following:

Dostoevsky’s writings:

With the exception of the volume Erzählungen von F. M. Dostojewskij (Leipzig: Reclam, 1886), Nietzsche read Dostoevsky in the French translations published by Plon (Paris). As will be shown, these translations played a pivotal role in Nietzsche’s understanding and interpretation of Dostoevsky’s writings. To ease the reading, without sacrificing philological accuracy, in the first part of this volume I cite the English translation of Dostoevsky’s writings in the body of the text and then the corresponding French translation in the footnotes.

For the English translations, when available, I have used the Pevear and Valokhonsky translations. For Notes from the House of the Dead and The Insulted and Injured, I have used B. Jakim’s new translations. The Landlady is contained in the volume Poor Folk and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1988), translated by D. McDuff. The Complete letters are available in five volumes (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1988–91). A Writer’s Diary has been translated by K. Lantz (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994, 2 Vols.). ← 12 | 13 →

The abbreviations used are the following:

Other abbreviations used:

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Preface

“They arrive in compact, deep lines. It is the revenge of 1812.¹ They will not set fire to Paris; we do not need any help to do that. They will drown it under printer’s ink. Throughout the summer they have furtively proliferated, they have come out of the press. […] I search for a volume of Voltaire: it has disappeared under a stack of Tolstoy’s books. My Racine has disappeared under those of Dostoevsky.”

With these words, which introduce one of several articles on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky published in the French newspapers during the 1880s, the literary critic Eugène Melchior de Vogüé (1886b: 824) alludes to the increasingly widespread diffusion of Russian novels within the Western Europe cultural world at the time. It is precisely within this historical and cultural context that Nietzsche’s discovery of Dostoevsky has to be set. It is the winter of 1886–87. Nietzsche arrives in Nice around the 20^th of October. He stays some months, taking advantage of the mild weather of the Mediterranean coast. While browsing in a bookshop, the volume L’esprit souterrain catches his attention. If we trust Nietzsche’s own account, he does not even know the name of the author. Nonetheless, he instinctively feels a sense of affinity and familiarity with him. Nietzsche buys the volume and reads it very carefully. From then on, in his last two years of lucidity, the philosopher conducts a deep inner dialogue with Dostoevsky.

It is no surprise that Dostoevsky’s novels fascinated Nietzsche. Without denying the considerable differences that make their respective worldviews diverge from each other, one could easily find several similarities between the novelist and the philosopher. Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were great psychologists, able to explore the depths of the human soul and to grasp both its complexity and its more problematic and immoral aspects. They also understood and diagnosed the phenomenon of nihilism probably better than any other intellectuals ← 15 | 16 → of the nineteenth century, providing an excellent and essential analysis of this multifaceted phenomenon. Moreover, they sought to give an answer to similar moral and philosophical problems. Their answers clearly differed, but what characterized them both was their same depth of approach.

European intellectuals soon realized that the paths of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were destined to merge. Strictly speaking, it was Georg Brandes, the Danish critic and scholar, who first connected the works of Dostoevsky with Nietzsche’s philosophy in his book Impressions from Russia.² In a chapter dedicated to Dostoevsky, Brandes applied Nietzsche’s categories to the novelist, interpreting him as a particular example of the man of ressentiment, while his morality was precisely the same slave morality described by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morality. Besides this brief comparison, however, there is little doubt that the first to draw attention to the relationship between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were Russian intellectuals. The peculiarity of this first reception was the identification between Nietzsche’s overman with some of the main nihilistic characters (such as Raskolnikov, Kirillov or Ivan Karamazov) in the great Dostoevsky novels. This “mythopoem”, to use Grillaert’s expression (2008: 41), was generally accepted and turned into a sort of unquestioned dogma, enduring throughout the years.