For the past six to seven months I have been leading the way for developing what we hope will be the first full blooded Foreign Literatures in America (FLA) archive based on receptions of Russian authors. While Peter Mallios has given Foreign Literatures in America its initial intellectual impetus, during the day to day research and archiving I have encountered innumerable small points of inquiry, seemingly mundane at first but then suddenly realized as potent obstacles to our research goals. Thus far and into the foreseeable future, no one hiccup in my process has crippled my efforts, but these moments raise questions the will ultimately enrich our archive and computational analysis in unexpected ways. For example, as the title of this entry suggests, the issue of names has raised a number of red flags. As one should expect, the transliteration of names from one alphabet into another is asking for trouble.
Let me provide a concrete case: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский, or perhaps better known to most readers here as Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. That particular transliteration is, for the moment, only my personal convention that I have imposed on the project until we turn to the question of our own choice of spellings, which will likely undo all of my personal preferences. Even Wikipedia disagrees with me, spelling the author's name as Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky. Ultimately the difference here seems inconsequential; I believe those two spellings are currently the most widely accepted. As a result, one might think that to find reception documents I would only need to enter into an archival database a text string like "Dostoevsky" OR "Dostoyevsky". If only it were so!
From the eighty-three reception documents about Dostoevsky that I have so far acquired, we have seen a huge variance in the historical transliteration of the author's name. I will let some examples speak for themselves:
Dostoievksy Dostojevski (from a review of an article in a Scandinavian periodical) Dosteovsky (a misspelling?) Dostoieffsky Dostoevsky Dostoyevsky Dostoyefsky Dostoievski Dostoevskii
These are only a few of the variations that I have noted in passing during my research; as part of the digital analysis with which FLA is experimenting, we are painstakingly cataloguing spellings so that we may reflexively expand our research and analysis parameters. But from my own initial efforts, based on the examples that I have found and permutations that I have hypothesized, I have constructed an initial list of forty-five potential English spellings of the Russian writer's last name:
Dosteoffski Dosteoffskii Dosteoffsky Dosteofski Dosteofskii Dosteofsky Dosteovski Dosteovskii Dosteovsky Dostoeffski Dostoeffskii Dostoeffsky Dostoefski Dostoefskii Dostoefsky Dostoevski Dostoevskii Dostoevsky Dostoieffski Dostoieffskii Dostoieffsky Dostoiefski Dostoiefskii Dostoiefsky Dostoievski Dostoievskii Dostoievsky Dostojeffski Dostojeffskii Dostojeffsky Dostojefski Dostojefskii Dostojefsky Dostojevski Dostojevskii Dostojevsky Dostoyeffski Dostoyeffskii Dostoyeffsky Dostoyefski Dostoyefskii Dostoyefsky Dostoyevski Dostoyevskii Dostoyevsky
This ad hoc list is likely to grow, and the spellings of first names and patronymics will geometrically complicate it. Антон Павлович Че́хов, or Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, poses a similar though less diverse problem: the Cyrilic character "Ч" (like the Greek "chi") can be translitered as either "Ch" or "Tch". Thus, I have seen both Chekhov and Tchekhov. The name of another famous author, Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й or "Leo" Tolstoy, presents a contrast to Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Whereas in English we almost always see only either "Tolstoy" or "Tolstoi," the awkward sounding "Lev" in Russian has been transformed in a number of ways into the English alphabet. To date, I have seen "Lev," "Leo," "Lyof," and even a few "Leons" in a single issue of Craftsman in which both the names "Leo Tolstoy" and "Leon Tolstoy" appear. While the names "Dostoevsky" and "Chekhov" are more singular signifiers, many figures with the name "Tolstoy" have circulated in the American cultural sphere: for example, Tolstoy's children and relatives on the one hand, and the Russian science fiction writer Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy on the other.
Eventually, with a full catalog at our disposal, we will be able to conduct the most expansive searches for and analyses of reception articles based on our Russian authors functions. But, in addition, we now have to ask ourselves how might spelling variations inflect such reception? I imagine that this question and its kin will require both sophisticated digital analysis and humanist attention as we continue onward.
Nick Slaughter is a first year PhD student in English at the University of Maryland. He is an Executive Editor at the Foreign Literatures in America project.