Erik McDonald

Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1821-1889) first appeared in Full Stop in 2023 when I interviewed Nora Favorov about her translation of The Brother, which is now in press with Oxford World’s Classics (expected release August 2026). As readers are waiting for that, Erik McDonald has just published as a free e-book his translation of Khvoshchinskaya’s ingenious story “Behind the Wall” (1862). I had a conversation with Erik about this brilliant piece, the challenges of translating it, and the world of reform-era Russia that it addresses, full of burning questions about social change, love, and the meaning of marriage.

Anna Berman: First of all, for readers who want a refresher on who Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya was, I talked about this with Nora in our interview, but in short, she was one of the most popular writers in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century (the same period when Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were writing). Over a forty-year career using the male pseudonym V. Krestovsky, she published eleven novels and dozens of novellas and short stories (as well as poetry, criticism, and translations under her own name and other pseudonyms). Erik, what do you think stands out about Khvoshchinskaya’s prose writing?

Erik McDonald: Her range. She can make you dread a disaster that is both coming and already here, intensely, for a whole novella, in The Brother. Or she can write a story where you’d give a different answer to what it’s about every few pages, like “Vera.” She can have a wildly unsympathetic boy narrator walking the line between tragedy and farce, as in The First Struggle. Or she can show the humanity and vulnerability of petty villains before it turns out they are side characters in someone else’s story, as in “The Meeting.”

You’ve already translated one of Khvoshchinskaya’s stories, “The Meeting,” and made it available as a free e-book. How did you decide on this mode of dissemination?

I was starting to feel frustrated that everyone kept retranslating the same ten nineteenth-century books. Instead of a few more excellent but redundant versions of Dead Souls or Crime and Punishment, why couldn’t the same people give us the first translations of Pisemsky’s Troubled Seas, Khvoshchinskaya’s In Hope of Something Better, or Leskov’s “Episcopal Justice”? Because they wouldn’t sell, presumably. But in the internet age, publishing in the sense of making a text public is easy and cheap. Just as people now write open access textbooks, I think it makes sense to make and give away translations of public domain works, so readers have as broad a choice as possible when they explore the literary landscape.

Some people manage to publish translations of less famous older books in a more traditional way, and that’s fantastic, of course! I recently read and loved Avdotya Panaeva’s The Talnikov Family in Fiona Bell’s translation published by Columbia University Press, for example, and over the years I think four different translators have published at least one Khvoshchinskaya piece.

Many of us have taught Karen Rosneck’s translation of The Boarding School Girl published by Northwestern University Press. What were the others?

In 1996 Joe Andrew translated Khvoshchinskaya’s early story “On the Way,” and I think that was the first English translation, though her work appeared in other languages in her lifetime. The Slavic Literature Pod did an episode on it in 2023. Then, in 1999, Karla Thomas Solomon translated “After the Flood” from Khvoshchinskaya’s last decade. You mentioned Karen Rosneck’s The Boarding School Girl and Nora Favorov’s forthcoming The Brother, somewhat longer (but still not enormous) pieces from the middle of her career. Those were the four people I was thinking of.

What drew you to “Behind the Wall”?

You did! I was at a 2022 conference when you said it was one of Khvoshchinskaya’s short works that needed translating the most, and then I read it and agreed. It starts with some deliberately slow long paragraphs from the narrator, and then for the last three quarters it feels like not a word is wasted. Somehow it simultaneously feels like a carefully constructed experiment and an unpredictable emotional story about living people.

One of the most fascinating parts of this story is its formal peculiarity. Could you talk a little about that?

The story is told by an eavesdropper who shares a wall with one half of a couple whose love affair of five years has suddenly been renewed after a separation. He hears their conversations—though only the ones that take place next door—and he also hears them trim candles, throw coats on couches, or write a letter he can’t see. The whole thing feels very natural, but we and the narrator know that our information is incomplete.

There must be particular challenges to translating a story where the narrator is reliant entirely on sounds to piece together or imagine what is happening. What was it like to work with a text that does not have visuals? How did you handle all the dialog?

There weren’t as many troublesome verbs describing particular sounds as I was afraid there would be, and the lack of visuals must have caused more difficulties for the writer than the translator.

Khvoshchinskaya’s dialogue is deceptively hard. You always have to be listening for the overtones, for what is implied and how things sound to each hearer. In this story there was an additional issue. For long stretches, there is just direct speech, without even “she saids” or “he saids,” but the Russian reader knows who is talking from gendered verb forms. I wanted to keep the effect of the narrator being completely silent, which makes us feel like we’re the eavesdroppers, but that means it requires more effort to keep track of who says what in English.

What other difficulties did you find in translating this text?

The formal and informal pronouns are what I struggled with the longest. In 1862 it was much more common for people to switch between addressing each other as “thou” or “you” in response to temporary changes in emotions and relationships, and that happens a lot in this story. You don’t want to skip over it, but it’s very strange to use “thou” in modern English, and other ways of conveying the shifts feel intrusive and imprecise.

What kinds of options did you consider and what did you ultimately go with?

At the most extreme I thought about actually saying “thou” or putting the word “you” in italics or all caps, but people quickly talked me out of that. In one draft I tried metalinguistic comments like “X said, switching to the formal form of address.” That was a bit clunky and wouldn’t mean much to some readers. Manipulating the characters’ word choice—like having extra Latinate roots in English where there was a formal pronoun in Russian—was hard to do in short sentences and didn’t feel right anyway. So I ended up with the unsophisticated solution of adding “X said coldly” when I thought the point of the formal pronoun was to be cold and that didn’t otherwise come across.

What other difficult choices did you find yourself making as a translator?

Near the beginning of the story the narrator has a few paragraph-length monologues that are full of melancholy and monotony—it’s a cold and rainy every day, and he’s lonely and sick—and I was always scared my version would either come out boring or not capture that mood. And there were some little things, like when the neighbor’s visitor always says the same word as a greeting, but at different times of day, so “good morning” and the like won’t do. I tried and failed to avoid using “hello,” which is a borderline anachronism.

The role of the narrator is fascinating in this story. Everything is mediated through him, and he never even learns the names of the people he’s listening to, yet he forms strong opinions about them. How reliable do you think his narration is?

The narrator halfway falls in love with the woman and comes to resent the man, but I nevertheless see him as relatively reliable. He comes across as committed to the truth, and he tells us things that make him look bad, mostly lets the two lovers speak for themselves, and paints human portraits of them both when he does comment on their story.

We know that he has a powerful imagination. Early in the story he gets upset at his absent friends for things he imagines they would say were he to see them. As you translate it: “I was glad I had been forgotten by friends and strangers alike; I was irritated in advance by all their prudent remarks about capriciousness and illness and common sense, their sympathetic jokes, their happy people’s wisdom.” What do you make of this? Do you think he is accurate in what he images is happening on the other side of the wall? Or is he embellishing beyond what he could know?

I think I am a naïve and trusting reader, and I do imagine him accurately conveying what he hears, even when he perhaps wishes he could change it or keep it secret. He has a way of imagining plausible situations, whether about his friends visiting his sickbed or his neighbor’s unspoken thoughts. Sometimes he discovers his guesses about the man’s or the woman’s thoughts were wrong, and when that’s the case, he tells us. We can’t check his words against anything else, of course, but I’d find it easier to invent a less trustworthy narrator than a more trustworthy one. But I’ve talked to many people who read more into the narrator’s motives than I do, and my reading might be idiosyncratic.

At the heart of this story is the question of marriage: what does it mean? Is it a form of bondage for the women who enter into it? Or is it a societal validation and an affirmation of love? Do you think the story takes a side on these issues?

This is another place where my impressions are different from those of most people I’ve talked to about the story. I see Khvoshchinskaya carefully arranging everything so the authorial position does not seem to take a side. Two decent and intelligent characters are each allowed to make their case eloquently, and it’s an effective touch that the woman is the one defending an idea of marriage that she agrees amounts to bondage. Then each of them also gets to make angry accusations which half-convince us of their beloved’s selfish motives for not giving in. All this happens against the backdrop of real freedom for both: either could end the affair if they were unwilling to concede the argument, and life would go on. Both are financially independent, neither would face social disgrace, and they have no children in common. It’s only the combination of their mutual love and incompatible beliefs that keep them trapped between yes and no.

I fully agree that the authorial position is neutral and that Khvoshchinskaya allows both the man and the woman to make the best possible case for their viewpoints. Yet when I read an earlier version of your translation with a group of MPhil students last year, they were unanimous in siding with the woman. In particular, they were upset by the man’s deceit on a day when he remains home but asks his servant to tell the woman he is out. This dishonesty is in striking contrast to the woman’s seeming sincerity. Do you think the man is equally sincere in his love? Or is she right to start doubting him?

I see the two as equally sincere in their love for each other, but that’s the surprise twist at the end—we expect her to reopen the conversation and try to change “no” to “yes” for the twentieth time, but instead he tries to, and she walks out. It turns out that he wants to be with her in particular, not just any attractive woman, in the kind of free and egalitarian relationship he thinks is superior to a marriage where a husband can have the police return his wife to him by force if she leaves.

The man’s behavior that understandably upset your students isn’t praiseworthy, but the part of their story the narrator doesn’t witness is crucial for understanding the part he does. They had apparently had a long and difficult conversation on this topic somewhere else that ended with the woman refusing to continue the relationship on the man’s terms and, as he saw it, breaking things off. It’s convenient for the author to leave this conversation out, for artistic reasons and also to invite the reader to imagine all the things the man said about marriage that wouldn’t have made it past the censor.

I’m so glad that you mentioned the censor. Could you tell Full Stop readers a bit about what Khvoshchinskaya would not have been able to include?

Seeming “anti-marriage” was a problem for Khvoshchinskaya here and elsewhere and for other writers of her time. The tsarist censor had a long, evolving list of implicit and explicit commandments, from “no calls for a constitution” to “nothing pornographic” to “no personal insults.” In the mid-1860s, Nikolai Nekrasov wrote a poem listing what Russian editors were scared to publish, and undermining marriage is the first one, followed by undermining parental authority or the dignity of the nobility, stirring up the poor against the rich, and critiquing religious faith. At one point in “Behind the Wall,” the man is railing against hypocritical attitudes about marriage. Couples cheat on each other right after they vow to be together forever, yet people call this a sacred institution. The man says it would be more honest to admit people are just animals if that’s how they’re going to behave. The censor cut all this. The journal editors left in half a hyphenated word from a deleted passage, so readers could see something was missing, and then Khvoshchinskaya undid the cuts when a book version was published.

Khvoshchinskaya wrote a preface to the 1866 edition that you also include with your translation. Can you tell readers about that. How did it shape your thinking about the story?

In that preface she apologizes to real or imagined progressive critics for not taking a definite stand in favor of free love. It reminded me how fast things were changing in the early 1860s, which I think you really feel when you read Khvoshchinskaya, a partisan of the Great Reforms. I don’t think she wanted to disavow anything in the story, but the ground had moved under her feet. It’s as if an American wrote a nuanced story about racial justice, public health, or political violence in 2020 and felt it would be strange to publish it again in 2025 without acknowledging that the world had changed and readers now demanded to know “which side are you on?” So I guess the preface made me appreciate how topical the story was, even as it invites you to read its nameless characters as eternal.

Especially given that the characters caught up in the drama go unnamed, “Behind the Wall” really becomes a story about man and woman. Khvoshchinskaya published it—like all her fiction—under the male pseudonym V. Krestovsky and we learn in the very first paragraph that the narrator is male. How do you think the gender of the biographical author, the pseudonym, and the narrator play into this? Does the knowledge of Khvoshchinskaya’s gender alter your reading at all?

I wish I knew how I would have taken the story if I hadn’t known Krestovsky was a woman, but I knew going in. The awful examples of #MenWritingWomen notwithstanding, I think good writers in general, and Khvoshchinskaya in particular, make it hard to guess their gender from their prose. I’m thinking of “The Meeting,” which puts us inside different sorts of gendered experiences—Khvoshchinskaya lets us see through the eyes of a man hungrily watching a drunk young woman dance and tear open her dress, when not long before she had made us feel like a woman waiting for a gentleman caller who never called.

“How would the story be different if the narrator were a woman?” is actually an essay prompt I used the first time I taught this story, and I haven’t made up my own mind about it. I do think that Khvoshchinskaya could have skewed the narrator’s perspective more by making him a different kind of man. I know there’s nothing magically genderless about an irritable, cerebral writer of modest means. But if you swapped him out for, say, a soldier full of stories of male camaraderie or a ladies’ man recalling his conquests, the story wouldn’t have the “neatly balanced experiment” kind of neutrality that I see in it.

The man on the other side of the wall is also a particular type: a member of the nobility and amateur musician. What would you say is the role of music in the story?

On one level, it’s the thing the man cares about but the woman doesn’t, in balance with her daughter. The man and woman care about each other, and they care about what their relationship should and should not be like, and they also care about things outside the love affair, but different things. Music is also a barometer of the narrator’s feelings toward the man next door. He says “you can make me into anything you like with music,” meaning that the neighbor is such a good musician the narrator can’t be objective about him, but he’s wrong: when he starts to disapprove of the man, he stops liking his music.

Is there anything in particular that you are hoping readers will take away from the story?

Mainly a desire to read more Khvoshchinskaya, which is what I took from it myself.

Thank you so much for this interview! I’m delighted that anglophone readers can now experience “Behind the Wall” for themselves.

Thank you!

Anna A. Berman is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880 (Oxford UP, 2022), Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Path to Universal Brotherhood (Northwestern UP, 2015), and the editor of Tolstoy in Context (Cambridge UP, 2022). She is currently writing a biography of Nadezhda Khvoschhinskaya.