Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883)
A new German translation of A Sportsman's Sketches. 1874
Autograph letter signed (‘Iv. Turgenev’) to August Viedert, König von England [Hotel], Carlsbad, 7/19 August 1874.

In Russian. Two pages, 228 x 145mm. Provenance: Serge Lifar (1905-1986), stamp to upper left of p.1 – Sotheby’s, 10 June 2009, lot 107 (part).

On a new German translation of A Sportsman's Sketches. Turgenev had completely lost sight of Viedert, and is delighted to hear his news: for himself, he is at Carlsbad trying 'as far as possible to get rid of the gout, which torments me greatly, but here I again had a seizure and I am abandoning the treatment and leaving for Paris'. He hopes that Viedert did not go to Berlin with the sole purposes of publishing his translation of A Sportsman's Sketches, as a new German translation is being published by [Erich] Behre in Riga with Turgenev's permission as part of the very successful series of his selected works in German: 'if the translator used some parts of your translation, which I doubt, I have nothing to do with it and can do nothing about it'. He hopes that one day they may meet again, perhaps in Saint Petersburg.

Published in New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1991, 49. Ironically, Turgenev did not in the end much like the translation of A Sportsman's Sketches published by Behre: but the incident finally put paid to August Viedert's attempts, stretching back almost 20 years, to publish the full series of his own translations.

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