a question about Dostoevsky and prisons

[dusty wilmes]

I found the following related passage in another English translation
available for free online
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37536/37536-h/37536-h.htm --
translator is Bramont, I believe), which might help you track down the
passage in the original that Constance Garnett turned into the famous
phrase. This passage is 2-3 pages after the beginning Chapter 3 (The
Hospital):

"That the possibility of such license has a contagious effect on the
whole of society there is no doubt. A society which looks upon such
things with an indifferent eye, is already infected to the marrow. In
a word, the right granted to a man to inflict corporal punishment on
his fellow-men, is one of the plague-spots of our society. It is the
means of annihilating all civic spirit. Such a right contains in germ
the elements of inevitable, imminent decomposition.

Society despises an executioner by trade, but not a lordly
executioner. Every manufacturer, every master of works, must feel an
irritating pleasure when he reflects that the workman he has beneath
his orders is dependent upon him with the whole of his family. A
generation does not, I am sure, extirpate so quickly what is
hereditary in it. A man cannot renounce what is in his blood, what has
been transmitted to him with his mother's milk; these revolutions are
not accomplished so quickly. It is not enough to confess one's fault.
That is very little! Very little indeed! It must be rooted out, and
that is not done so quickly."



On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 1:49 AM, Hugh Olmsted <hugh_olmsted at comcast.net> wrote:
> Sasha, Bob, et al.,
> Playing around with back-translation into Russian of Bob's English quote, it
> is easy in Google.ru to find the following Russian text widely attributed to
> Dostoevsky: "Если общество хочет проверить уровень своей цивилизации, пусть
> заглянет в тюрьму".  But nowhere that I've seen is the attribution spelled
> out - no specific work of Dostoevsky's ever seems to be mentioned, let alone
> any more specific locus.
> I've gone through all the other works of Dostoevsky as listed in the
> Lib.Ru/Klassika (URL http://az.lib.ru/d/dostoewskij_f_m/), searching for
> significant parts of this text, to no avail.  A more intense search there of
> Записки из мервого дома - trying out variant grammatical forms, close
> synonyms, and the like - also comes up with zilch.
> Maybe it IS a misattribution, or maybe it springs from a different authorial
> version/edition of Записки than what is standardly available ??  At any
> rate, in case it may spare somebody the work of repeating these steps, here
> is the report on what I've tried.
> Best,
> Hugh Olmsted
>
>
> On Dec 15, 2012, at 8:32 PM, Robert A. Rothstein wrote:
>
> On 12/15/2012 11:38 AM, Sasha Spektor wrote:
>
> The phrase "По состоянию тюрем можно судить о состоянии общества" has been
> attributed to Dostoevsky and said to be from "Записки из Мертвого Дома."
> It's not there, at least neither I nor my word search can find it.  Did he
> say it somewhere else?  Is it an apocryphal attribution?  I would really
> appreciate your collective wisdom in this case.
>
> The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro, quotes "The degree of
> civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons" from
> Constance Garnett's translation of The House of the Dead.
>
> Bob Rothstein
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--
Justin Wilmes
Ph. D. Student/Graduate Teaching Associate
Dept. of Slavic and E. European Languages and Literatures
Ohio State University

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