After Reception Theory

Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain, 1869-1935

Lucia Aiello

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907975448
• eBook ISBN: 9781351192293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"More often than not, monographs on the reception of an author are either detailed, chronologically organised accounts of the reputation of that author, or studies in literary influence. This study adopts neither of those approaches and deals with the reception of Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain from a double perspective. The detailed analysis of primary sources such as reviews, essays and monographs on Dostoevskii is associated here with a critical investigation of the dynamics of the reception process. On the one hand, the available sources are examined with the intention of exposing their underlying ideological tensions and impact on British literary circles. On the other hand, Fedor Dostoevskii's novels are shown to function as a prism, through which significant aspects of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British intellectual life are refracted. In the final analysis, by using Dostoevskii as an exemplary case study, this book develops both a methodology that aims at clarifying what we mean when we refer to 'reception' and a theoretical alternative to prevalent notions of reception."

CHAPTER 1
The Introduction of Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain: A Difficult Start

The Early Years: A Deliberate Omission

In The Russian Novel in English Fiction (1956), Gilbert Phelps states that ‘the first step [...] in any examination of the reception of the Russian novel in England must be to shift the emphasis away from Dostoevsky, and to place it instead on Turgenev’.¹ This trait of the reception of Dostoevskii, also highlighted by Helen Muchnic and Dorothy Brewster, is worth focusing on more carefully.² If one were to compare the level of popularity of Dostoevskii’s works with those of Ivan Turgenev across Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the disparity of reception is striking. It has been argued that a contributory factor to Turgenev’s popularity was the fact that he spent most of his adult life in Europe. Yet by 1880 Dostoevskii was a well-known author in Russia,³ and by the end of 1890 the majority of his fictional works were available in translation in France and Germany. In Britain during the same period, only few second-hand translations (mostly from the French) of the major novels were available, and the publication of such an important work as Brat’ia Karamazovy went virtually unnoticed. Only in the section devoted to ‘recent light literature’ in Russia does the Contemporary Review mention briefly a ‘very interesting novel of Dostoievsky’.⁴ The first English translation of a novel by Dostoevskii appeared in 1881, when Marie von Thilo’s version of The House of the Dead was published in London and New York with the title of Buried Alive: Or Ten Years of Penal Servitude in Siberia.⁵ As a reviewer later remarked, although Thilo’s translation was a free rendering by a Russian lady from the original Russian text, and in spite of the positive reviews that appeared in journals such as the Academy and the Athenaeum, ‘[...] the book, so far as we remember, attracted little notice’.⁶ It was only the ‘striking demonstration of respect with which Dostoevskii’s funeral had been attended at St. Petersburg’ that raised the curiosity of the British literary press towards him and his works.⁷

In her monograph, Helen Muchnic does refer to the cultural resistances that hindered Dostoevskii’s popularity in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, but she does not focus on the reasons why this occurred.⁸ In some respects the negligible number of English translations and reviews dedicated to Dostoevskii is as significant as the enthusiastic reception of the two other major Russian writers, Lev Tolstoi, and especially Turgenev. The quantity of regular reviews of Russian fictional and non-fictional works in British journals and magazines, at least since the Crimean War (1853–1856), suggests that we are dealing with the omission of one particular writer rather than with a lack of interest in Russia and Russian literature. The ongoing interest in Russian culture and literature in the aftermath of the war can be ascribed to the necessity of better knowing the culture and history of a nation that from an economic, political, and military point of view, was challenging the hegemonic role of the leading Western countries. Russian fiction, as soon as it became available in translation, functioned as a credible medium through which some of the mysteries of the ‘Russian soul’ could be deciphered. A review of Nikholai Strakhov’s book, General Tendency of Russian Literature,⁹ published in the Athenaeum in 1869, is emblematic of the way in which the notion of ‘Russia’ was mediated for British readers. In his book, Strakhov complained about the backwardness of Russian ‘civilization’ in comparison with other Western nations. His call for a deep-rooted national Russian literature was based on the belief that the time has come for Russia to confront the rest of Europe on equal terms. In his view, Russian artists should oppose ‘the absurd preference of foreign over native models’. Although he admired Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, he was sceptical of his later novels, which he regarded as more aligned to the Western European literary canon.¹⁰ According to Strakhov, Turgenev’s Smoke, for instance, could only have been composed by someone who had given himself over to Western culture and values and ‘looked at Russian life with detachment’.¹¹ That he did not refer only to ‘literary’ values is made obvious in a passage that the reviewer quotes from Strakhov’s book:

Now, more than ever before, we feel our distance from Western Europe; now, more fully than ever before, we are penetrated with a deep sense of our weakness relatively to her, whether measured by material arms or by those of morals and intellect. The sack of Sevastopol opened our eyes to the real state of our extrinsic power; but revelations even more painful and humiliating have since been made to us respecting our moral and intellectual condition. Where, we ask, are our Europeans? Where are we to look for those who, schooled by Western Europe by many generations, ought by this time to stand upon the same level with their masters, and to cope with them on terms of equality?¹²

Strakhov was clearly concerned with Russia’s status in the European political scene and regarded literature as a national asset for regenerating the country after the ‘ashes of Sevastopol’.¹³ Of course, the Athenaeum reviewer agreed only in part with Strakhov’s comments on the resurgence of Russia. On the one hand, he shared Strakho v’s concerns about the progressive penetration of nihilist ideas in Europe, as epitomized by the character of Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. He condemned ‘the fancied degeneracy of the present day, which appears to animate so many honest and well-meaning men in our country, as well as in that of Mr Strachoff’. On the other hand, his comments on the characteristics of the ‘Russians’ reveal much about the position of power and superiority from which Britain judged Russia, but also about Britain’s trepidation in the face of the concrete threat that Russia’s expansionist ambitions posed to the stability of the empire. As the reviewer comments:

[Strakhov] has laid his finger with surgical accuracy upon the one great blemish of the whole frame of Russian thought. For it is unquestionably true, that the marvellous power of imitation which makes the Muscovite the best of subordinates makes him also the worst of leaders.¹⁴

The Athenaeum reviewer valued in Turgenev’s Smoke what Strakhov disliked the most, namely his ‘detachment’ from ‘native models’, which was one of the contributing factors to his popularity in Britain. When Dostoevskii was practically unknown in Britain, Turgenev’s novels were already acclaimed as champions of ‘true Realism’, far removed from the uncompromising pessimism of Emile Zola (1840–1902) and the French Naturalists.¹⁵ However, there is more to the dismissive attitude towards Dostoevskii than a simple dispute over the adherence to ‘native models’. What was it that made Turgenev so attractive for the British public? On the one hand, Turgenev’s refined style and appreciation of Western European values made his novels more palatable to British readers. Turgenev was at once a ‘symbol’ of the humanitarian struggle for the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and a model of stylistic elegance. He was also Russian enough to preserve that touch of exoticism and unpredictability that readers were expecting from a culture so alien to theirs. On the other hand, at a deeper level, Turgenev’s Realism, unlike Zola’s, did not linger on unnecessary and prurient details and his sympathetic, tender, and humane attitude towards his peasant characters corresponded perfectly to the ‘liberal’ and ‘humanitarian’ spirit of the day.¹⁶ Turgenev’s obituary, published in the Athenaeum in September 1883, is suffused with admiration. He is described as a great artist, who ‘has reached the pinnacle of literary excellence’, a very balanced man, who, in spite of his ‘Russianness’, showed great lucidity of thought with regard to his attitude towards the West and the dispute between Slavophiles and Westernizers:

Notwithstanding his cosmopolitan popularity, Tourguénief was a Russian heart and soul. [...] he loved his country, but had no sympathy with the Philo-Slav party. To him it seemed childish to ignore the labours of the West, and to endeavour to create an Eastern Slavonic civilization out of the ruins of the patriarchal autocracy which had been based on serfdom and the knout, institutions which he hated cordially.¹⁷

The reviewer appreciates that, although Turgenev was close to the French Naturalists and had even lived amongst them, he was never one of them, he never reached the ‘excesses’ of a Zola or fellow-Naturalists: ‘He never permitted himself to exaggerate, not for one single instant even to be so carried away by his idea as to be false to human nature.’¹⁸ A. R. R. Barker, author of Turgenev’s obituary in the Academy, particularly insists on this point:

Turgenev possessed in the highest degree that combination of imagination and the analytical faculty which is essential for the production of life-like fiction. He has been styled the chief of European realists. But he was a realist only in the sense that all great artists who borrow their inspiration direct from nature may be called realists. His art had not the least affinity either to that of the French school that likes to rake together the garbage of life, or that of some modern writers who painfully evolve ‘studies of character’ out of their own consciousness. [...] His pages are warmed and lighted by a poet’s fancy, but at the same time the artist never loses sight of his models. Hence there is nothing grotesque about Turgenev’s most original creations.¹⁹

In order to appreciate in what terms and why Turgenev for a certain period was presented as a viable alternative both to French Naturalism and to Dostoevskii, it is worth focusing on the cultural climate in which the Russian novel was introduced in Britain. The acrimony shown by the Academy reviewer against the ‘French school’ was not an isolated phenomenon. In Britain, fictional works adhering to the principles of Naturalism, such as the so-called ‘industrial novels’ or the ‘slum novels’,²⁰ were subject to attacks on both moral and aesthetic grounds, and it was not unusual for publishers to demand that entire pieces be re-written on the basis that they offended against current moral principles.²¹ Yet the new perspective on society offered by the Naturalist novel did have some impact, in that it contributed to intensifying the atmosphere of disenchantment and revealed the discrepancy between the social and economic optimism of the bourgeoisie and the real conditions of social and economic disparity among classes. The unfettered development of towns helped, quite literally, to map out within the new cities the economic, social, and cultural gulf among classes.²² Fiction became the ground on which the denunciation of the degraded conditions of the urban slums could be argued but contained, as it were, between the two realms of social observation and literary imagination. The appearance of the urban poor as the main subject matter of certain fictional works, however, did not necessarily bring about an extension of the reading market to the lowest strata of society. Both the industrial and the slum novels were written by authors who, and for an audience which, were not working class but had middle-class origins and, most importantly, were distinguished from the upper-class ‘men of letters’.²³ A new layer of intellectuals gained public visibility by getting involved in philanthropic campaigns and spending time and effort in drawing the attention of the whole of society to a situation that risked becoming uncontrollably alarming. In this cultural climate, publishers started to target their audience by producing books by the middle classes for the middle classes and books by the middle classes for the working classes. In actual fact, although the working classes did not exert control over any of the structures of the emerging cultural industry, they still had access to products that were not originally destined for them, such as, for example, works of literature and didactic texts purporting to educate the masses through ‘useful knowledge’.²⁴

In general, the growth of leisure and, as part of it, the expanding of reading habits contributed to a changed attitude towards so-called ‘imaginative literature’. In spite of the persistence of religious and utilitarian prejudices against reading for entertainment, the wider circulation of books favoured a wider circulation of ‘light literature’. The habit of reading fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Transliteration and Translations
• Preface
• Introduction — The Inner and the Outer: A Methodological Premise
• 1 The Introduction of Fedor Dostoevskii in Britain: A Difficult Start
• 2 From 'Morbidity' to 'Sickness': A Portrait of the Artist as a Degenerate Man
• 3 The Making of a Cult: Facts and Critical Perspectives
• 4 Problems of Dostoevskii Criticism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index