Merz 1
Anna Merz
Honors Project
Dr. Martha Kuchar
8 December 2014
Dickens and Dostoevsky Discuss Fathers:
A Study of Literary Influence and Evolving Dialogues
In 2011 the New York Times published a report alleging that in 1862 a meeting took place in London between two literary giants: Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this alleged incident, Fyodor Dostoevsky visited Charles Dickens in his editorial offices “and found Dickens in an expansive mood” (Naiman 1). Apparently, Dickens barred his soul to Dostoevsky and explained to him that in his works, Dickens’s villains came from an understanding of his own dark self, and his “good simple people” came from an understanding of how he should live his life (Naiman 1). Scholars immediately challenged the idea that such a meeting had ever taken place, and Eric Naiman’s dedicated research to discover the answers behind this rumor soon exposed that it was fabricated (Naiman 14). However, Naiman’s 2013 article reminded the literary world of an interest it has expressed for centuries in a connection between Dickens and Dostoevsky.
The connection between these two outstanding nineteenth century authors has been interesting to the literary community for several reasons (some of which I will articulate later in the essay), but particularly in the way that scholar N. M. Lary articulates in his 1973 study Dostoevsky and Dickens. In his book, Lary writes: “When we look at two novelists from different national literatures, to find what one of them had to learn and could learn from the other, the challenge to our critical faculties is especially great” (xiv). Despite the difficulties of examining two authors across national borders and cultural traditions, the present essay intends to take up Lary’s challenge and ask what Dostoevsky learned from Dickens.
The tradition of literary study and influence from one author to another is not a new concept for current literary theoreticians. It can be taken for granted that writers are influenced by what they read.However, Harold Bloom’s interpretation of this writing relationship suggeststhat such relationships of influence are more complicated than meets the eye.In his study The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Bloom explains that his theories about the “anxiety of influence” apply to “strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death” (5). Bloom asserts that all poets are influenced by those who wrote before them, but that it is only the “figures of capable imagination” who are able to “appropriate for themselves” and to struggle with the “immense anxieties of [literary] indebtedness” to “create himself” (5). Truly great poets (and for the purpose of my analysis I have extended this theory to include all writers), according to Bloom, must “search for where [they] already are”; they must attempt to ground themselves in literary history by using the influence of their predecessors to create something uniquely theirs (13). In Bloom’s work he uses “six revisionary ratios” to describe six general paths that poets take in order to “revise” the literary elements bequeathed to them (14). For the purpose of this essay, I will focus on the ideas that Bloom attributes to the second of his “revisionary ratios”: “Tessera” (14).
Bloom opens this Tessera section of his book with a quote from Emerson: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts—they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”This quote illustrates the complexity behind the Tessera ratio. Using a word that originally comes from “ancient mystery cults, where it meant a token of recognition, the fragment say of a small pot which with the other fragments would re-constitute the vessel,” Bloom describes Tessera as a “completion and antithesis…a token of recognition” with which one poet “antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough” (Bloom 14). The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry suggests that for some authors (Bloom dubbed them “ephebes”), their readings of the works ofother writers (“precursors”) has resulted in a reworking or reevaluation of terms, elements, arguments, andassertions made first in the predecessor’s works (14).Bloom explains that this relationship isn’t simply a passing along of ideas, it is not “the transmission of ideas and images from earlier to later poets” but instead it is a kind of inspiration which“ephebes”find in “precursors’” works. This inspiration to go beyond the teacher leads to a creation of a new piece of literature which develops these same “inspirational” elements (71).
My essay isinspired by Bloom’s ideas about literary influence and as well by Lary’s challenge (noted above) with support from the works of MacPike, Fanger, Lary and others who have studied the connections between Dickens and Dostoevsky from various angles. My contribution centers on their examination of the roles and types of fathers in the novels they wrote. Through their writing on fathers we will see how Dostoevsky’s documented admiration for Charles Dickens’s writing inspired him to begin a revisionary dialogue with the English writer in the style of Harold Bloom’sTessera.
To explore this relationship further, my essay will first show factual evidence of the ways in which Dostoevsky and Dickens were connected. I will discuss revisionary relationships that Dostoevsky began with other authors, Dickens’s presence in nineteenth century Russia,and the documented evidence we have of Dostoevsky reading and appreciating Dickens. In the next part of the paper, I will reassert my thesis about the authors’ depictions of fathers, a process that shows the revisionary relationship between Dickens and Dostoevsky, and I will discuss the social reasons each writer had to discuss fathers in their novels. My essay will classify fathers in each author’s works as absent, abusive, or ambiguous. Finally, I will discuss the solutions that each author offers for society’s problematic fathers. I will conclude with words from Dostoevsky in which he presents society with the central answer he believes addresses all of the concerns that struggling fathers face in their lives.
For the purposes of this study, I am limiting my analysis to two key works by each author with additional commentary based on an additional text of each. For Dickens: David Copperfield and Bleak Housewith some evidence drawn from The Old Curiosity Shop . ForDostoevsky: Crime and Punishment and The Possessedwith some additional evidence drawn from “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter and a few other chapters from The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s history of revisionary relationships with other authors, his documented admiration for Dickens, and Dickens’s own popularity in Russia during the Nineteenth century all point to the validity of my thesis: Dickens’s initial assertions about the changing role for fathers in Nineteenth century England inspired Dostoevsky and provided him with a frameworkto depict absent fathers, abusive fathers, and father figures in his novels in ways that complicate and deepen the narratives that Dickens’s characters participate in. Because of Dickens’s thoughtful depictions of fathers of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky is able to offer a more complex dialogue for families who seek to move forward after the traditional notions of fathers’ roles have been toppled completely.
Before we discuss Dostoevsky’s and Dickens’s writing relationship, it is important to explain the groundwork that other scholars have laid on this subject and the assumptions that can be made with their work in mind. First, it is necessary to demonstrate that Dostoevsky could have participated in the kind of dialogue that Harold Bloom describes in his work as a revisionary extension of another author’s work (Bloom 14). In Gary Rosenshield’s work,Challenging the Bard: Dostoevsky and Pushkin, a Study of Literary Relationship, Rosenshield describes just such a relationship that surely occurred for Dostoevsky as he competed with and sought to improve onPushkin. Rosenshield begins his work by explaining that Dostoevsky’s obvious and documented admiration for Pushkin was much more than “unqualified worship of one’s literary idol” (Rosenshield 4). Rosenshield describes Dostoevsky’s writing relationship in almost the exact terms of Bloom’s theory: “Fortunately, despite the veneration, Dostoevsky’s relationship with Pushkin was, especially in the first part of his career, quite competitive: the great poet was the master who had to be challenged if the younger writer was to carve out his own literary space” (Rosenshield 4). Rosenshield goes on to describe Dostoevsky’s character as such that “precisely because he recognized Pushkin’s literary achievement, Dostoevsky needed to engage him, critically and creatively, in order to say something of his own” (4). Rosenshield also specifically qualifies Dostoevsky’s relationship with Pushkin as akin to Bloom’s “view of the ephebe’s (the strong younger writer’s) need to reinterpret, rewrite, and correct his great precursor” (4). Between Dostoevsky and Pushkin (and, as I observe, between Dostoevsky and Dickens) Rosenshield does not ignore the two writers’ dissimilarity in “genres, styles, ideological concerns, and contexts” but instead recognizes the ways that these differences “emphasize[] the importance…in Dostoevsky’s engagement with and reaction to Pushkin’s work” (5). In the rest of this study, Rosenshield successfully draws parallels between Pushkin’s “The Stationmaster,” The Bronze Horesman, The Covetous Knight, and The Queen of Spades and Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Gambler, and Crime and Punishment. Gary Rosenshield presents a study of “literary relationship” that aptly illustrates Dostoevsky’s own participation in Tessera-style dialogues with other writers.
For example, Rosenshieldconcludes that Dostoevsky’s narrator in Poor Folk represents a revision of Pushkin’s narrator in “The Stationmaster” (65). He asserts that “the way sentimentalism is integrated into the novel’s [Poor Folk] texture” is Dostoevsky’s “most significant achievement” in his revision of Pushkin’s work (65). Rosenshield states “it is this integration that is Dostoevsky’s main transformational strategy with respect to…Pushkin” (65). Rosenshield ends this particular analysis by saying
“we can see Dostoevsky rejecting the parodic uses of sentimental poetics in “The Stationmaster”…restoring their original validity and overlaying it onto a realistic base, challenging his readers to accept that the sentimental, the literary expression of the heart, is potentially as real (even when expressed in as outmoded form as the epistolary novel) as the most prosaic Petersburg reality.” (65)
Dostoevsky’s clear writer relationship with Pushkin tells us that he drew from many literary precursors in his history as a novelist.
In another study of literary influence called Dostoevskii’s Overcoat: Influence, Comparison, and Transposition, Dostoevsky scholars similarly show that Dostoevsky sought out revisionary dialogues with writers other than Pushkin. In this work various authors point to Dostoevsky’s clearly documented writing relationship with Gogol, and especially with Gogol’s The Overcoat. Though they do not specifically cite Bloom, we may say that the articles in this collection provide another example of Bloom’s revisionary-writer relationship. Andrew begins his work by citing a statement Dostoevsky is supposed to have made that credit’s Gogol’s The Overcoat with providing a kind of literary patronage for all Russian writers after: “We have all come out from underneath Gogol’s Overcoat.” (1). Andrewand the other authors discuss relationships that Dostoevsky clearly relied on in his writing, with writers such as Turgenev, Pushkin, and Gogol. In the final chapters of Dostoevskii’s Overcoat, the commentators cite more modern examples of the ways in which Dostoevsky has influenced writers such as Akira Kurosawa, Bresson, Pamuk, and Nabokov. This work clearly traces Bloom-style relationships in Russian literature and features those in which Dostoevskyengages with authors like Gogol and Pushkin in revisionary-style relationships and is later revised by new ephebes.
Dickens in Russia
While it is clear that Dostoevsky did engage in these revisionary writing relationships with Russian authors like Gogol and Pushkin,this in itself does not necessarily predict that Dostoevsky would have sought out these kinds of relationships with non-Russian writers like Dickens. However, there is proof that as far as writer popularity goes, Dickens held the same kind of prestige in the Russian reading community as authors like Pushkin and Gogol. Many authors who describe their lives in Russia in the nineteenth century depict reading Dickens for the first time as a rite of passage into the “serious” literary community. One Russian citizen (identified as “A Russian Correspondent”),whose writing appears in Donald Davie’s Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction, says of Russian youth:
“It was a red-letter day when the bespectacled, soft-spoken librarian, shyly asked to recommend a book, cast a gravely scrutinizing look at the youthful reader and then, still slightly hesitating, picked a copy of Dombey and Son from the crowded shelves and put the volume in a glossy uniform binding on the counter. For such an act was tantamount to a solemn recognition of one’s mature age and good literary education…” (117).
In the same essay, the author explains that there was even an understood method for reading Dickens for the first time as a Russian youth: first, one would read a “serious” work by Dickens, like Dombey and Son, and then the reader would be permitted by his or her library to check out any of his works with the assurance that the more serious work read first guaranteed that the reader would treasure all Dickens’s literature appropriately (118).
In an essay written by V. G. Korolenko, awell-known Russian short story writer, Korolenko describes his first “encounter with Dickens” and the way it changed his reading, and writing, forever afterwards (Korolenko). Korolenko describes sifting through Dombey and Sonas a child in the hopes of discovering some kidnapping scenes, or daring rescues in his older brother’s book and instead finding a poignant discussion between Dombey and his daughter, Florence. Korolenko wondered: “Now why, why did he write that?...So horrible and so cruel. Surely he might have written differently … Yet no. I felt then that he could not, that it was in fact thus, and he only saw this horror and was himself shaken, just as I was … And behold, to the heart-rending cry of the poor solitary girl was added the despair, pain, and rage of his own heart” (110). As a young person, Korolenko was struck by Dickens, and remembered his name long after he forgot authors of other favorite works: “I did not look at the names of the authors of books which afforded me pleasure, but this name [Dickens], so silvery-sounding and pleasant, at once fixed itself upon my memory” (Korolenko).
It seems this reverence for Dickens was common for othersbesides Korolenko and the writer included Davie’s collection. As MacPike noted in her work, Dostoevsky himself attempted to articulate the Russian love for Dickens in his Diary of a Writer:
“We, however, understand Dickens, when rendered into Russian, almost as well as the English—perhaps, even all nuances. Moreover, we love him—perhaps, not less than his own countrymen. And yet, how typical, original, and national is Dickens! What can be derived from this?—Is such an understanding of alien nationalities a special gift of the Russians, as compared with Europeans?” (MacPike 5).
Aside from contemporary proof that there was a specifically Russian love for Dickens, inhis study Dostoevsky and Dickens: A Study of Literary Influence, published in 1973, Lary writes that “the mark of Dickens is everywhere in Russian fiction.”He cites Tolstoy, Chernyshevksy, and Dostoevsky as a collection of writers who were all influenced by Dickens’s work enough to cite it in some of their major novels (Lary ix). Lary’s insights attest to theongoing focus on Dickens in Dostoevsky’s work, long after the passing of both authors. Loralee MacPike also contributes to this historical account of Dickens’s influence in Russia. In her book Dostoevsky’s Dickens: A Study of Literary Influence MacPike explains that Dickens’s works were generally translated into Russian on the heels of their serial releases in England (MacPike 3). Dickens’s books were said to be read by “everyone” in Russia and that “in all probability there was not a single Russian writer, artist, publisher, or educator of the nineteenth century who remained indifferent to Dickens’s works, and the best of them prized him especially” (3). N. M. Lary even goes so far as to say that Dickens had a relationship with Russian authors that was so imbedded in their consciousness that they may have not been overtly aware of it. He says, “The most interesting evidence of an author’s reputation and influence consists of this kind of non-explicit and sometimes unconscious indebtedness” and asserts that readers of Dickens possessed this “indebtedness” to Dickens in their works (Lary x-xi).
Dickens’s wide-spread influence in nineteenth century Russia has been accounted for by various scholars. In the view of the Russian author ofthe monograph Dickens in Russia, a Moral Educator, Dickens was appreciated in Russia for more than just his humor or his characters, which did endear him to his readers (117). The correspondent suggests that Dickens’s “melodrama” and the complicated “man vs. himself” psychological struggles were what caused Russian audiences to love Dickens so much (119). However, the correspondent also cites that Dickens’s writing style was also definitely attractive to Russian audiences. In Donald Fanger’s Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, Fanger notes that Dickens freely played with the techniques of exaggeration, fantasy, and a writer’s ownership of his own world (Fanger 65). In Dickens in Russia, a Moral Educator, the author suggests that this writing style became even more fanciful and visually interesting after being translated into Russian. The correspondent says: