eBook

Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1900–1930

Kaye, Peter

1999,2009

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: 20th century / Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881 -- Influence / English fiction / English literature / English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism / English literature -- Russian influences / History and criticism / Modernism (Literature) / Modernism (literature) -- Great Britain / Russian fiction -- Appreciation -- Great Britain
• ISBN: 0521623588, 0521024196, 9780521623582, 9780521024198