In Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation of the 1871-1872 novel The Demons, the following appears:
Oh, most certainly, et vous fairez un bienfait …
(The French is italicised in the text of the translation, and an identical French clause appears in the original Russian text.) With the context of the line, it is clear that Stepan Trofimovich, the speaker, means that Lizaveta Nikolaevna (the woman to whom he speaks) will do a good deed (i.e. fera un bienfait). That Dostoevsky writes fairez and not ferez bothered me: I imagine fairez and ferez have the same pronunciation, but that is hardly a reason for using what I would believe to be an incorrect spelling. A search for "fairez" "ferez"
and "fairez"|"fairont"|"faira"
generated a few relevant results from Google Books:
- Histoire de la ville de Marseille (1696): the history reports the response that a group of men obtain from a king, which contains both fairez and ferez
- Apologie pour Hérodote (1735): again, both fairez and ferez appear in close proximity
- Letters of the Grand Duke Peter, as given in Memoirs of the Empress Catharine II, contain both fairez and ferez, although the spelling is consistent in individual letters. No date is given for the letter, but the editor notes that the letters contain "grammatical and orthographical blunders". (Indeed, Peter signs off one letter with votre affectione amy.)
But with the exception of Peter's letters, these examples date to at least a century before Dostoevsky. With this in mind, two questions:
Was fairez ever an acceptable spelling in Dostoevsky's milieu? (I remember seeing a correct spelling for one of the future tense conjugations of faire in Robespierre, but I would not be surprised to hear that French orthographic standards taught in Russia were not up-to-date. I also imagine that were fairez a misspelling, the mistake would have been caught prior to publication.)
Is there any particular reason for the inconsistent spelling (within the same chunk of text) in the first two documents?