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One of the most famous quotations in the history of Russian literature is Fedor Dostoevskii's alleged assertion that 'We have all come out from underneath Gogol's Overcoat'. Even if Dostoevskii never said this, there is a great deal of truth in the comment. Gogol certainly was a profound influence on his work, as were many others. Part of this book's project is to locate Dostoevskii in relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries. However, the primary aim is to turn the oft-quoted apocryphal comment on its head, to see the profound influence Dostoevskii had on the lives, work and thought of his contemporaries and successors. This influence extends far beyond Russia and beyond literature. Dostoevskii may be seen as the single greatest influence on the sensibilities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To a greater or lesser extent those concerned with the creative arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have all come out from under Dostoevskii's 'Overcoat'.

At first glance, the works of Fedor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) do not appear to have much in common with those of the controversial American writer Henry Miller (1891–1980). However, the influencer of Dostoevsky on Miller was, in fact, enormous and shaped the latter’s view of the world, of literature, and of his own writing. The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon examines the obsession that Miller and his contemporaries, the so-called Villa Seurat circle, had with Dostoevsky, and the impact that this obsession had on their own work. Renowned for his psychological treatment of characters, Dostoevsky became a model for Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Anais Nin, interested as they were in developing a new kind of writing that would move beyond staid literary conventions. Maria Bloshteyn argues that, as Dostoevsky was concerned with representing the individual’s perception of the self and the world, he became an archetype for Miller and the other members of the Villa Seurat circle, writers who were interested in precise psychological characterizations as well as intriguing narratives. Tracing the cross-cultural appropriation and (mis)interpretation of Dostoevsky’s methods and philosophies by Miller, Durrell, and Nin, The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon gives invaluable insight into the early careers of the Villa Seurat writers and testifies to Dostoevsky’s influence on twentieth-century literature.

This article examines the complex of connections between Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner's work and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's art and thought. A writer, critic, editor, publicist, and translator, Brenner was a key figure in the Hebrew republic of letters in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although Brenner's writings deal extensively with existential dilemmas of the Jewish people, his fiction and publicist writing demonstrate an obvious affinity for Russian literature, particularly Dostoyevsky's narrative art. The first part of this article discusses ideological and poetic aspects of Brenner's works that combine his experience of \"recovering\" from the ideas of universalist socialism during his service in the tsarist army with his affinity for Dostoyevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions . The second part addresses the influence on Brenner's early conceptual novels of the artistic stratagems employed by Dostoyevsky to critique the Enlightenment in Notes from the Underground . The third part offers a comparative analysis of the artistic stratagems used in the publicist writings of Dostoyevsky and Brenner, particularly their attempts to incorporate fictional elements into journalistic texts.

Although Walker Percy named many influences on his work and critics have zeroed in on Kierkegaard in particular, no one has considered his intentional influence: the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In a study that revives and complicates notions of adaptation and influence, Jessica Hooten Wilson details the long career of Walker Percy. Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence demonstrates-through close reading of both writers' works, examination of archival materials, and biographical criticism-not only how pervasive and inescapable Dostoevsky's influence was but also how necessary it was to the distinctive strengths of Percy's fiction. From Dostoevsky, Percy learned how to captivate his non-Christian readership with fiction saturated by a Christian vision of reality. Not only was his method of imitation in line with this Christian faith but also the aesthetic mode and very content of his narratives centered on his knowledge of Christ. The influence of Dostoevsky on Percy, then, becomes significant as a modern case study for showing the illusion of artistic autonomy and long-held, Romantic assumptions about artistic originality. Ultimately, Wilson suggests, only by studying the good that came before can one translate it in a new voice for the here and now.

When Constance Garnett's translations (1910–1920) made Dostoevsky's novels accessible in England for the first time they introduced a disruptive and liberating literary force, and English novelists had to confront a new model and rival. The writers who are the focus of this study - Lawrence, Woolf, Bennett, Conrad, Forster, Galsworthy and James - either admired or feared Dostoevsky as a monster who might dissolve all literary and cultural distinctions. Though their responses differed greatly, these writers were unanimous in their inability to recognize Dostoevsky as a literary artist. They viewed him instead as a psychologist, a mystic, a prophet and, in the cases of Lawrence and Conrad, a hated rival who compelled creative response. This study constructs a map of English modernist novelists' misreadings of Dostoevsky, and in so doing it illuminates their aesthetic and cultural values and the nature of the modern English novel.

An exemplary collection of work from one of the world's leading scholars of intellectual history László F. Földényi is a writer who is learned in reference, taste, and judgment, and entertaining in style. Taking a place in the long tradition of public intellectual and cultural criticism, his work resonates with that of Montaigne, Rilke, and Mann in its deep insight into aspects of culture that have been suppressed, yet still remain in the depth of our conscious. In this new collection of essays, Földényi considers the fallout from the end of religion and how the traditions of the Enlightenment have failed to replace neither the metaphysical completeness nor the comforting purpose of the previously held mythologies. Combining beautiful writing with empathy, imagination, fascination, and a fierce sense of justice, Földényi covers a wide range of topics that include a meditation on the metaphysical unity of a sculpture group and an analysis of fear as a window into our relationship with time.

When geniuses meet, something extraordinary happens, like lightning produced from colliding clouds, observed Russian poet Alexander Blok. There is perhaps no literary collision more fascinating and deserving of study than the relationship between Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Russia's greatest poet, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), its greatest prose writer. In the twentieth century, Pushkin, \"Russia's Shakespeare,\" became enormously influential, his literary successors universally acknowledging and venerating his achievements. In the nineteenth century, however, it was Dostoevsky more than any other Russian writer who wrestled with Pushkin's legacy as cultural icon and writer. Though he idolized Pushkin in his later years, the younger Dostoevsky exhibited a much more contentious relationship with his eminent precursor. In Challenging the Bard , Gary Rosenshield engages with the critical histories of these two literary titans, illuminating how Dostoevsky reacted to, challenged, adapted, and ultimately transformed the work of his predecessor Pushkin. Focusing primarily on Dostoevsky's works through 1866—including Poor Folk , The Double , Mr. Prokharchin , The Gambler , and Crime and Punishment —Rosenshield observes that the younger writer's way to literary greatness was not around Pushkin, but through him. By examining each literary figure in terms of the other, Rosenshield demonstrates how Dostoevsky both deviates from and honors the work of Pushkin. At its core, Challenging the Bard offers a unique perspective on the poetry of the master, Pushkin, the prose of his successor, Dostoevsky, and the nature of literary influence.

Russian writers of the nineteenth century were quite consciously creating a new national literary tradition. They saw themselves self-consciously through Western European eyes, at once admiring Europe and feeling inferior to it. This ambivalence was perhaps most keenly felt in relation to France, whose language and culture had shaped the world of the Russian aristocracy from the time of Catherine the Great. In How the Russians Read the French , Priscilla Meyer shows how Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy engaged with French literature and culture to define their own positions as Russian writers with specifically Russian aesthetic and moral values. Rejecting French sensationalism and what they perceived as a lack of spirituality among Westerners, these three writers attempted to create moral and philosophical works of art that drew on sources deemed more acceptable to a Russian worldview, particularly Pushkin and the Gospels. Through close readings of A Hero of Our Time , Crime and Punishment , and Anna Karenina , Meyer argues that each of these great Russian authors takes the French tradition as a thesis, proposes his own antithesis, and creates in his novel a synthesis meant to foster a genuinely Russian national tradition, free from imitation of Western models. Winner, University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies