Between Fiction and Physiology: Brain Fever in The Brothers Karamazov and Its English Afterlife

Abstract

Working at the intersection of translation theory and medical humanities, this article interrogates the term brain fever, which Constance Garnett, adhering to clichés of English sentimental fiction, uses in reference to a wide variety of medical conditions in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Garnett’s choice has become useful shorthand for the narrative function of delirium in Dostoevsky’s works, but it obscures the sensitivity to medical terminology that informs the Russian texts. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky stages the conflict between Enlightenment rationality and religious mysticism by satirizing the terminology of medical authorities and contrasting it with the language of faith, which posits its own etiology for mental diseases. Garnett’s abundance of interpolated brain fevers can be read not as a simple mistranslation but as marking the roles of translation and diagnosis in mediating the various cultural paradigms produced in fictional worlds.