The paper discusses the following questions: In what sense and to what extent can translation be considered a shaping force in literary and cultural history? And how can individual literary texts become a sort of meditation, a cultural memory of different translating choices or models? It approaches translation as a privileged point of expression of cross-cultural contacts, a paradigm of textual manipulation and multidirectional exchanges. The author focuses on the first translations of Dostoevski's works in Western Europe.