Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1900–1930

A study of the responses of major English novelists of the early twentieth century to Dostoevsky's work.

Peter Kaye (Author)

9780521623582, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 May 1999

258 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'The achievement of Kaye's book is its gathering together of different cases of influence … it does present some plausible and fresh readings of modernist texts which reveal Dostoevsky's presence where it hasn't always been appreciated. In Woolf's essays Modern Fiction, for example; or The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, which is deftly compared to The Possessed.' The Times Literary Supplement

When Constance Garnett's translations (1910–20) 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.

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Prophetic rage and rivalry: D. H. Lawrence
3. A modernist ambivalence: Virginia Woolf
4. Sympathy, truth, and artlessness: Arnold Bennett
5. Keeping the monster at bay: Joseph Conrad
6. Dostoevsky and the gentleman-writers: E. M. Forster, John Galsworthy, and Henry James
Conclusion
Notes
Selected bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]