Bringing it Home

Extract

One can confidently assume that Bristol University's Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Henry Gifford (1913–2003), knew several, perhaps even many, people born in the nineteenth century. Growing up in London, attending Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, serving in the Royal Armoured Corps during the war, and lecturing at Bristol University from 1946, Gifford presumably dealt with various individuals for whom at least some part of the 1800s was first-hand experience.¹ The impact of that century, furthermore, would have been strongly evident in his lifetime at the level of certain institutions, cultural customs, language, and so forth, making itself felt even to those most fervently seeking modernity. It was perhaps such direct knowledge which lay behind a particularly striking remark in Gifford's finely detailed essay on translating Tolstoy, first published in 1978.² In its opening paragraph, Gifford argues that Tolstoy presents relatively few obstacles to his twentieth-century readers, whether in the original Russian or in translation, bolstering his aesthetic impact.

Tolstoy's milieu still … remains largely accessible to us … Despite the immense upheavals of political and industrial revolution in Russia, the last five or six decades of the Empire, during which Tolstoy wrote, are … present to our imaginations … the historical imagination is hardly needed to call up the world in which Tolstoy lived.³