Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
During his religious awakening and subsequent "withdrawal" from literature, Leo Tolstoy looked back at Christian primary texts in an effort to grasp the original teachings of Christ, an authentic core of Christianity that was unpolluted by ecclesiastical authority and dogmas. At the heart of this investigation was a two-year-long (1880-81) effort to retranslate and harmonize the four New Testament gospels- from the original Greek into Russian-known as Harmonization and Translation of the Four Gospels (...) (henceforth Harmonization).
Judging by the presentation of the piece, Tolstoy appears to have intended it as a work of philological scholarship. The highly argumentative Harmonization presents Tolstoy's own translations side by side with the original Greek verses and the recently published Synodal translation. 1 Since Tolstoy's translations almost always differed from official translations, the verses were often followed by lengthy commentaries in which Tolstoy defended his frequent divergences. In these commentaries he relied on his patented "common sense," which was informed and amplified by scholarly facts and a scholarly stance. Time and again he cited lexicon definitions of Greek words (such as the numerous definitions for the Greek "logos," which he famously translated as "awareness"2 [...]), vigorously interpreted the grammatical structure of the original Greek, and polemicized with passages from orthodox liturgy as well as with previous New Testament translations such as Edouard G. E. Reuss's La Bible, nouvelle traduction avec commentaire (published in increments 1874-79).
Despite this scholarly façade, the Harmonization turned out to be a deeply subjective work that was intimately tied to Tolstoy's Weltanschauung. Scholars have viewed it as an exemplar of "Tolstoyan textology" (Morson 25) or even, somewhat more lightheartedly, as "the gospel according to Saint Leo" (McLean 142). Given its philological apparatus and Tolstoy's own descriptions, perhaps it is natural that the Harmonization should inspire such characterizations.
In the end, regardless of the philological and translation standards that he set for himself, Tolstoy translated according to his own very subjective criteria. Tolstoy took scissors to the gospels, eliminated passages at will, and combined verses from different gospels under the banner of harmonization.3 At the expense of philological standards, he ended up editing and translating the New Testament in such a way that its final message corresponded to his own...