Russian Garden Gazette

Netochka Nezvanova was serialized in the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) in January, February and May 1849. Dostoevsky had planned a large novel but never finished it: in April he was arrested in the Petrashevsky affair. The last installment appeared after his arrest, without the author’s name.

Dostoevsky later revised the novel, and it is this later version that most readers know.

Jon Lindseth, however, was drawn to the original text, the one the young Dostoevsky’s contemporaries read in 1849.

Little by little, a collector’s find turned into the idea for a new edition.

The man who gave Alice to Oxford

So who is Jon Lindseth?

To get a sense of the scale of his interests, let us step away from Dostoevsky for a moment and travel to Oxford.

In early 2025 the American collector and philanthropist gave Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford whose chapel is also Oxford’s cathedral, one of the world’s largest private collections devoted to Lewis Carroll.

It includes rare editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, more than two hundred autograph letters, original photographs and negatives, and an extensive collection of translations of Alice into the world’s languages. Lindseth did not just collect translations; he helped new ones come into being, including in some very unexpected languages, from Church Slavonic to Klingon, the language invented for the Star Trek universe.

The choice of Christ Church was no accident. It was there that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known to readers as Lewis Carroll, taught mathematics, and there that the story which gave the world Alice began.

Lindseth was one of the editors of Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece (2015), a monumental study of the famous book’s journey around the world.

What interests him is not only the rarity of a book as an object, but the way a literary work travels between languages and cultures.

Book collecting, though, is only one side of Jon Lindseth’s character.

In 2023, at the 50th anniversary celebration of Cornell Outdoor Education, he climbed to the top of the climbing wall that bears his name. He was 89. There is a video of it.

A man who can spend hours studying rare nineteenth-century books and still take on new physical challenges with youthful zest clearly does not see age as a reason to give up on adventure.

Incidentally, readers of the Gazette have already met the Lindseth name without knowing it. Jon’s father, Elmer L. Lindseth (1902–1999), led the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company for many years and tirelessly promoted Cleveland as “the best location in the nation.” A professorship at Case Western Reserve University bears his name, and in 2000 it went to Igor Efimov, the hero of our previous issue and, like Anna Kondratova, a graduate of Phystech.

So our two issues turn out to be connected not only through Phystech but, quite unexpectedly, through the Lindseth family. As for the shared surname of the scientist Igor Efimov and the violinist Efimov in Netochka Nezvanova, let it remain one more of fate’s little jokes.

The next chapter of our story suits his character perfectly.

In praise of tennis

How did an American collector with a passion for the history of English and Russian literature find someone he could trust to translate Dostoevsky?

The answer is unexpected: through tennis.

Anna Kondratova and her whole family are devoted to the game. Anna’s younger daughter, Masha, played at a tennis club where she met Jon Lindseth.

Jon was planning to enter a doubles tournament on grass courts. He needed a young partner who could make up for the speed he no longer had. The coach recommended Masha.

It was Masha who introduced Jon to her mother.

Conversations followed, shared interests came to light, and gradually the idea took shape: Anna would make a new English translation of Netochka Nezvanova.

There was something unusual about this choice, too.

Anna Kondratova is a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a research biologist with a doctorate. Russian is her native language, but literary translation was not her original profession.

Anna would later write in the book’s acknowledgments that without Jon Lindseth this work would never have existed. The idea of a parallel Russian–English edition was his.

And so a meeting on a tennis court gave rise to a major literary and publishing project.

Taking Dostoevsky back to 1849

There had been English translations of Netochka Nezvanova before. The first, by Constance Garnett, was published in 1920; translations by Ann Dunnigan and Jane Kentish followed.

The new edition is different: Anna went back to the original 1849 journal version. As far as she knows, this is the first English translation of that version.

For Anna it mattered to convey not only the meaning but the particular texture of the young Dostoevsky’s language: the long sentences, the repetitions, the unusual word order, the intonation and rhythm of the narrative. She deliberately resisted the temptation to make the text smoother and more familiar to the modern English reader.

Her indispensable partner was her elder daughter, Yelena.

A family enterprise

Lena was born in Russia and moved to America at the age of seven. Her experience of both languages proved especially valuable.

Anna and Lena read the Russian original and the English text over and over, discussing shades of meaning and looking for ways to keep the author’s voice without making the translation sound artificial.

At Jon Lindseth’s request, Lena also illustrated the book.

Anna’s younger children, her daughter Maria (Masha) and her son Alexander, joined in too, reading the English text and offering comments.

It became something close to a family literary enterprise.

It is especially touching that Masha, who set the whole story in motion by meeting Jon, later took part in the work on the book herself.

But when the translation was finished, the team discovered that one more, entirely unexpected task lay ahead.

The adventures of an antique Cyrillic

The makers of the edition wanted not only to set the Russian and English texts side by side but to preserve a visual link with the original 1849 publication.

This work was taken on by Jared Bendis, a publisher and specialist in digital technology and historical typography.

He had to study scans of the pages of Otechestvennye Zapiski and the peculiarities of nineteenth-century Russian civil type, restore damaged letters, and find ways to reproduce old-fashioned typesetting with modern tools.

And Bendis himself did not know Russian.

The work gradually grew into a research project of its own. The typeface had to be reconstructed, the old orthography understood, and a host of technical problems solved.

Then, just when the book seemed practically finished, came a surprise: the Russian text, as typeset, was almost impossible to read.

It was back to work: correcting errors and solving all over again problems that had been considered settled.

Others who contributed to the edition include the editor Kathleen Mills, the designer Jerry Kelly, and Alexander Chubinsky, who helped obtain materials from Russian collections.

So a project that began with the purchase of an old magazine required the collaboration of people of different professions from different countries.

A young Dostoevsky we hardly know

Working on Netochka Nezvanova revealed a different Dostoevsky to Anna.

Not only the great author of heavy philosophical novels, the man we are used to picturing as tormented by moral questions, but a young writer: compassionate, witty, blessed with a wonderful sense of humor.

A writer who had not yet lived through arrest, a staged execution and penal servitude.

Perhaps this is one of the new edition’s greatest gifts: it takes us back to a moment when Dostoevsky’s literary fate had not yet been decided.

And the story of how the book came to be is a reminder of the unexpected paths literature travels.

Charlotte Brontë led an American collector to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Tennis introduced him to his future translator. Anna’s scientific training, her command of Russian, her children’s help, and the labor of editors and specialists in antique typography all came together in a single project.

And it all began with a simple question:

Why does one old magazine cost so much more than the others?

Dostoevsky had high hopes for Netochka. After the resounding success of Poor Folk, the young author quickly discovered the other side of fame. Critics greeted his next works with harsh ridicule: they did not fit the progressive social and political agenda that dominated at the time.

In December 1846 he wrote to his brother Mikhail, his closest friend and literary ally:

“I am now swamped with work, and I have promised to deliver to Kraevsky the first part of the novel Netochka Nezvanova by the 5th of January… I am writing with zeal. It keeps seeming to me that I have started a lawsuit against our entire literature, the journals and the critics… and that this year, too, I am establishing my primacy, to spite those who wish me ill.”

The plan was ambitious: Dostoevsky intended to publish the novel in Andrei Kraevsky’s journal Otechestvennye Zapiski over six or seven issues. By his own account, as early as mid-1846 he had “the plot (and the prologue) and the idea” in his head, but the work dragged on. The first two parts appeared only in the January and February issues of 1849.

The continuation was cut short by Dostoevsky’s arrest in April 1849. The unfinished fragment came out late, in the May issue, without the name of its author, who was by then imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.

In 1847–1848 Dostoevsky attended the “Fridays” of Mikhail Petrashevsky. At first this was an informal circle of advocates of peaceful reform who discussed the ideas of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Over time, people with more radical views joined. This drew the attention of the secret police of Nicholas I, who had been alarmed by the revolutionary events in France. A curious detail: Petrashevsky was the godson of the previous emperor, Alexander I.

The arrest was followed by eight months of solitary confinement and a closed trial. Dostoevsky, who belonged to Nikolai Speshnev’s radical group, was sentenced to death by firing squad. The emperor had commuted the sentence in advance but ordered that this be announced only at the last moment.

On the morning of December 22, 1849, the condemned men were brought to the snow-covered Semyonovsky Square. The death sentence was read out. The first three prisoners were dressed in white shrouds, tied to posts and blindfolded. Dostoevsky was in the second group of three. The command “Take aim!” rang out, but then the drums beat the retreat and an aide-de-camp arrived to announce the pardon.

On Christmas Eve, December 24, Dostoevsky was put in shackles and sent to Siberia. His term of penal servitude had been reduced from eight years to four, to be followed by service as a soldier in exile.

The mock execution left an indelible mark on the writer. One of the condemned men lost his mind and never recovered. Nearly twenty years later Dostoevsky put the experience of those last minutes before execution into The Idiot.

There is a bitter irony here as well: some of the ideas discussed at Petrashevsky’s later became part of the reforms of Alexander II, including the abolition of serfdom.

When Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, he did not take up Netochka again as a novel, but on the advice of friends he reworked it into a self-contained novella in seven chapters. He removed repetitions and “overly sentimental phrases,” shortened the heroine’s reflections and cut some episodes. The second part changed most of all: gone were Netochka’s friend, the little orphan Larya, and his tragicomic guardian Fyodor Ferapontovich, as well as some details of Prince Kh.’s family life.

In its new form the novella appeared in 1860 in the first volume of Dostoevsky’s collected works, published by N. A. Osnovsky in Moscow. This version became the basis for all later editions. The episodes about Netochka’s friendship with Princess Katya were often included in collections of stories for children.

A few words about the title

The heroine’s very name is full of meanings a Russian reader picks up almost unconsciously. In “Netochka” one hears net, “no,” while the affectionate diminutive suffix softens the negation with tenderness. The surname Nezvanova is entirely transparent: nezvanaya, uninvited, the one nobody asked for.

Netochka explains where her name came from as she remembers her mother:

“Besides, she called me Netochka, which meant that at that moment she was especially tender toward me. She had invented the nickname herself, turning my name, Anna, affectionately into Netochka, and when she called me that, it meant she wanted to caress me. <…> Then, poor thing, she stroked my head for a long time, perhaps mechanically by then, forgetting that she was caressing me, and kept murmuring: ‘My child, Anneta, Netochka!’”

For a translator this is a real puzzle: how do you convey negation and affection at once in English? One could call the heroine “Nonnette” or “Nonnetty” and render the surname as “Noncalled.” In Russian that would come out as something like “Netushka Nezvanaya”: a negation, but a soft, almost tender one.

There is another curious detail. In the 1849 journal publication and in the first book edition of 1860, the heroine’s name was printed with a stress mark: Nétochka. It probably helped readers pronounce an unusual name correctly. Later editions dropped the accent.

Netochka played a remarkable part in Dostoevsky’s own life as well. His future wife, Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, had read his works avidly since childhood, and her family nicknamed her Netochka. In 1866 the young stenographer came to work for Dostoevsky, and in February of the following year she became his wife, his devoted helper, and later the guardian of his literary legacy.

And so the unfinished story of one Anna unexpectedly continued in the life of another.

Efimov blames his failures on external circumstances: poverty, lack of recognition, a wife who supposedly stands in his way. His supposed genius becomes an excuse for idleness, cruelty and selfishness.

Dostoevsky asks: does artistic gift give a person the right to consider himself exceptional, and does it release him from moral obligations?

Art by itself does not make a person moral. And awareness of one’s own gift can become a source of dangerous egoism. This is already thoroughly Dostoevskian territory, which he would go on to explore in his great novels.