Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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> it's understood that it's meant as translated

I find it best to never underestimate how pedantic strangers on programming related forums can be, so good we've got that out of the way.

I imagine you'd enjoy Martin Porter's four Principles for Quotations and his two pieces on sourcing the Edmund Burke BogoQuote:

* https://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html

* https://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote2.html

( and possibly even Porter's paleoCompSci work on stemming: https://tartarus.org/martin/PorterStemmer/ )

> It's really curious why people who never read Dostoyevsky make up quotes for him with phrases that nobody with a good command of the Russian language could have written.

It's a solid quip, almost serviceable as a Reader's Digest Condensed Book one page summary of Dostoyevsky prison book save for being too good (in English at least) for that sad US affront to literature.

People make up quotes for all manner of reasons, imperfect memory, a need to summarise, it's a joy to tumble both rocks and words to knock off some rough edges and brighten up a gem. Attribution to "elsewhere" is also common enough -- it can upsell your own work by attribution to a great name, it can deflect criticism if you've only polished a turd.

As curious questions go though, why not attribute it to a translation of Solzhenitsyn or Henri Charrière, (it's in the spirit of Oscar Wilde or Stephan Fry perhaps, but their works are already in English and a little too familiar for the bogoquote treatment (maybe)).

People make up random quotes and attribute to random famous people but, at least, they follow the famous person's character. For example, I never doubted "The coldest winter I've ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" was by Mark Twain. He lived in San Francisco and it looks in line with his other jokes. I only found out because someone complained about a cold summer in Slack and I wanted to reply with a link to the quote so I asked an AI to source it.

With any Dostoyevsky quote I see in English, I immediately ask an AI to check because none looks like anything any 19th century Russian writer could have possible written, least so Dostoyevsky. Also, I've never ran into a real Dostoyevsky quote in English even as tortured one as Beauty will save the world (which is probably the most often used one in Russian even though it's a fragment of a sentence with an opposite meaning).

A great many people that read Russian novelists simply don't read Russian.

Translators can and do create translations that aren't faithful to the original in at least one or two significant ways. It's a challenge somewhat like Flattening the Earth - there's always some compromise on angles or areas.

As a result, there are many English readers who see Dostoyevsky through a clouded lens; they imagine him to have traits more unique to some translation than to his core.

* https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo363285...

I have not read English translations but they cannot possibly be so bad that they inverted the meaning, can they? I.e. the actual quotes from the "House of the Dead" go like these: "A man is a creature that can get used to anything and I think it's the best definition", "There are people like tigers, yearning to lick some blood", "Almost every modern man has latent qualities of a torturer", "The most elevated and the most characteristic quality of our people is the sense of justice and the thirst of thereof" etc.

It's very similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment and has nothing about "degree of civilization", which is a common concept in Anglo culture but very alien to Russians, who never figured that you can just subjugate and exterminate peoples with free conscience if you proclaim them to be "uncivilized".

To recap; the quote, as given here upthread on HN, was "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons", and I described it as "an attributed quote, translated, from discussions on and around his semi-autobiographical novel about time spent in prison."

So not an actual quote of his, but one sprung from the minds of people who imagined him to have said that or meant that.

There's an article that claims to have sourced the origin of that attributed quote (or bogus-quote) to 1964, the Canadian playwright and ex-inmate John Herbert [1]&[2] which I imagine you'd enjoy reading as the article author, Ilya Vinitsky, argues that Dostoyevsky would have been _aware_ of the Western notions of "civilisation" and prisons while not being _aligned_ with them.

A strong case is made for Herbert having started that attribution to Dostoyevsky, and for inspiring the spread of the quote as Herbert and his work were latched onto by prison reformers of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[1] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dostoyevsky-misprisioned...

[2] https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/beyond-reasonable-do...

The articles trace far more than I can (I'm not in the least bit fluent in Russian), and the specific blame likely falls to a non Russian prison inmate reading as widely as possible in prison, jumbling multiple sources, taking "literary licence" and not having access to a lot of background on Dostoyevsky.

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