a few more thoughts on Dostoevsky and Dickens

[naiman at BERKELEY.EDU]

At the risk of exhausting the patience of this list, I wanted to comment
on two aspects of the second book review in the NY Times to discuss the
Dickens-Dostoevsky meeting.  In Sunday’s book review, available a few days
ago on line as Rebecca Stanton has alerted us, the reviewer, David Gates,
makes two statements which may help explain the extraordinary success of
this “meeting” in subsequent scholarship and reviews:

------ Claire Tomalin, the other new biographer, who quotes this
confession in “Charles Dickens: A Life,” calls it “amazing” — though it’s
only amazing because it’s the image-conscious Dickens himself coming out
and saying what anybody familiar with his work and his life has always
intuited. “It is as though with Dostoyevsky he could drop the appearance
of perfect virtue he felt he had to keep up before the English public.”

As Tomalin notes, this “must be Dickens’s most profound statement about
his inner life,” and it seems to be one of the few crucial bits of
Dickensiana that’s relatively fresh. Both Tomalin and Michael Slater, who
cites the same passage in his 2009 biography, “Charles Dickens,” found the
newly translated Dostoyevsky letter in a 2002 article in The Dickensian.
Neither Fred Kaplan (“Dickens: A Biography,” 1988) nor Peter Ackroyd
(“Dickens,” 1991) seems to have known about it. Mostly, the recent
biographies are remixes of familiar episodes and anecdotes; their interest
lies largely in what’s included and what’s left out, how deeply the
biographer goes into unpublished or unfamiliar work, and what’s adduced
from further research into the world in which Dickens lived and worked.
-------

The second paragraph points to the peculiar situation in the market for
Dickens biographies, which seem to come along at a brisk pace.  The
premium for finding new riches in already depleted terrain is likely to
result in departures from established standards of scholarly judgment. 
When you can quote something this good, why take the time checking it in
Kazakh sources?  Or considering whether the author has ever published
anything before?  (Or the identity of her translator?)  The first
paragraph is more interesting.   The passage describing the meeting is
“amazing” because Dickens sounds like a person who has read 20th century
work written about him.  Dostoevsky’s rejoinder about personalities within
the author “Only two?” has a similar charge.  This is a Dostoevsky who
knows that in the following century he would become known as a master of
polyphony.  Bakhtin liked the joke about the ancient Greeks not knowing
the most important thing about them – that they were ancient Greeks.  In
this case, they know it.  That a reader might find it “the most
illuminating moment in Michael Slater's revelatory Charles Dickens” may
say more about the type of illumination we seek from a biography rather
than the character of the illumination.

Stephanie Harvey’s article in the Dickensian confirms this hunch.  She
begins by saying “Since Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’,
published in The Wound and the Bow in 1941, it has been something of a
commonplace that Dickens drew on what he suspected about his own character
and disposition for his villains, even the most theatrical and extravagant
of them.”  The long quote from Dosotevsky’s letter is presented as
“unexpected [and charming!] confirmation” of what twentieth-century
critics had been writing for the past half-century.  The opening of the
quotation from Dostoevsky’s purported letter does not have nearly the
attraction of the fly-paper quote from Dickens, but it is worth a close
look:  “Obviously a writer cannot escape from what he has seen and felt in
his own life.  It is his own senses that tell him that the sky is blue in
summer, that rain is wet, that ice is cold.”  To my ear, this doesn’t
sound like Dostoevsky -- the author of Notes from Underground would have
written "snow is wet," anyway ---- but perhaps I am wrong.  However, when
I googled “rain is wet” and “ice is cold”  together to see if anyone else
had said it I got 1490 hits – these are phrases not normally used about
artistic creativity but in dismissive put-downs, i.e. “what else is  new.”
 In fact, though googling all three elements - “the sky is blue,” “rain is
wet” and “ice is cold” -- produced only nine hits, the top one (on Yahoo
Answers) was headed “I need a list of obvious things in life.  Like, the
sky is blue.”

So perhaps the opening is a wink at a later reader.  And this whole
episode is proof that discovering Russia is a lot more interesting than
discovering America.  But although we can all agree with Professor
Hollington that “the evidence for the close
relationship between Dostoevsky’s writing and Dickens’s is
incontrovertible,” I think this episode does indeed matter.  It says
something about the often productive fantasies that can often pervade
comparative literature -- after all, the story is something of a parable
or a dramatized outline of a nice comparative paper --, about the
circulation of information in scholarship and at the nexus of scholarship
and intellectual popular culture, and, finally, about the genre of
biography, which often must turn its objects into the equivalent of
literary characters.  Stephanie Harvey’s article offers a wonderful
vignette, and even if it turns out to be incapable of being adequately
substantiated, it will live on for quite some time.  Dostoevsky's comments
about Christ might be respun here. Perhaps the resurfacing of the meeting
in the New York Times only a week after the Times posted its first
correction just goes to show that many people, given a choice between the
truth and Dickens, will take Dickens nearly every time.  That’s what draws
them to Dickens -- and fiction -- in the first place.  But maybe not to
Dostoevsky?

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