What happens when ‘strangeness kindles’? The intriguing notion comes from Woolf's reading notes on The Possessed: ‘all this strangeness can kindle at last into something [wild] & poetic’ (Rubenstein 2009: 173). The passage Woolf is referring to evokes a rush of compassion felt by Mavriky Nikolaevitch Drozdov when he sees Liza running outside:

Woolf's empathic response to the woman running in the fields seen through Drozdov's eyes is a fine example of how the reading notebooks reveal not so much what Mansfield and Woolf were reading, but their speculations as they read, interwoven with full or half-echoed quotes that point to the moment in the text that triggered their imaginative response. What strikes the contemporary reader who then rereads the Russian texts with their notebooks at hand is how rarely these notes refer to protagonists, plot or the overall dynamics; instead, they are notes from within, occupying the marginal, emotional spaces of the texts. They seize almost systematically on minor characters and fleeting details that a more voraciously plot-focused reader may not even notice, such as the little detail from The Possessed quoted above. These are the ‘spacious margins’ to be explored now, looking from the inside at the ‘dim and populous underworlds’ (EVW 2: 85) being re-enacted through translation. I see such marginal echoes, where ‘strangeness’ is allowed to kindle, as a fine illustration of translation's power as an ‘imprudent moveable’ – giving a Mansfieldian edge to ‘mutable mobile’ theories that contemporary translation critics use to illustrate translation's power to question and deflect textual agency.