The Belgian Fate of Dostoevsky’s Works: Les Confessions d’un assassin by Eugène Hins

The role of Belgium in the reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works in the West is far less known than that of France. Eugène Hins (1839–1923), a philologist, freethinker, freemason, secretary of the Belgian section of the First International, and anarchist close to Мikhail Bakunin, was a major literary translator from Russian into French in Belgium in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hins, whose ideas of Russia and its culture were close to those of the French Catholic viscount Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (1848–1910), wrote a novel entitled Les Confessions d’un assassin (Confessions of a Murderer) (1884–1885). After the Literary Awards Committee in Brussels suspected him of having plagiarised Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the reasons which led Hins to “adapt” Dostoevsky’s novel for the Belgian cultural milieu suddenly emerged. This article focuses on Les Confessions d’un assassin in light of an unpublished document – a preface that Hins wrote in order to justify his enterprise. Just like his Parisian counterpart É. Halpérine-Kaminsky (1858–1936), translator of The Brothers Karamazov and admirer of E.-M. De Vogüé, Hins was convinced that Belgian readers were not able to understand Dostoevsky’s work. For that reason, it was necessary, according to Hins, to “recreate” Dostoevsky’s novels in a Belgian (Western European) context. However, Hins was not only the author of a “bourgeois” version of Crime and Punishment, but also one of the significant promoters of anarchism in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century. His anarchist views greatly influenced his “transfer” of Dostoevsky’s ideas to the West. In addition, this article highlights different forms of the reception and transformation of Dostoevsky’s works in France and Belgium.