Charles dickens and russia (uzbek) literature I. Introduction II. Chapter. Charles dickens life and his work

3.2.Charles Dickens' contribution to Dostoevsky's wor


Being distinctive and even idiosyncratic, Dostoevsky's imagery cannot be comprehended without appreciating Dickens's role in his Russian contemporary's development of his unique style. For Dostoevsky's innovative use of language the most important element in Dickens's writing was the English novelist's using his visual imagination to express human feelings and relationships. One can appreciate Dostoevsky's inimitable style and characterization more clearly by comparing his characters and plots with those in Dickens's works.
In considering the role that Dickens's works played in Dostoevsky's creative work in applying Dickens's observations about English society to that of Russia, we should focus on the moral, psychological, and aesthetic force of F. M. Dostoevsky's applications of Dickens's plotting and characterization. In his Diary of a Writer (1873) Dostoevsky expressed his appreciation of Dickens in this way:We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, and maybe even all the subtleties; maybe even we love him no less than his own countrymen; and yet how typical, distinctive, and national Dickens is.
Dostoevsky grasped the power of the English writer's artistic vision; he called him a "great Christian," admiring especially Dickens's humbler characters. Moreover, the basis for Dostoevsky's assimilation of Dickens's style and vision was Dickens's treatment of the theme about the need for the reconstitution of society, and especially for the wealthy and powerful to display a greater humanitarianism towards that society's less privileged. As David Gervais remarks, "Dostoevsky saw a poetic spirituality beyond Dickens's morality" . As Dickens determined to be their voice in Great Britain, so Dostoevsky determined to be their voice in Russia.
Before treating the issues of creative assimilation of Dickens's manner and substance in Dostoevsky's works (1860-70), we should mention the external evidence of the Russian writer's passionate interest in emulating Dickens's genius. The period 1850-60 was crucial in Dostoevsky's creative assimilation of the spirit and style of Dickens's works. Dostoevsky's creative development was forcibly interrupted by four years of Siberian exile in Omsk "ostrog" (prison) between 1850 and 1854 and a further five years of relative isolation from mainstream culture spent in the Semipalatinsk settlement (1854-59). During this decade the Russian writer was alienated from the social and literary processes at work in Russia's cultural centres, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Even during this period of exile, however, we can detect his voracious interest in Dickens. In his book of remembrances and memoirs about Dostoevsky's exile, M. Nikitin presents anecdotal evidence; for example, M. Nikitin remarks that, "after his Siberian imprisonment in Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky read Dickens's novels by candlelight while often on the verge of tears" .
The result of Dostoevsky's fascination with Dickens one can find in Memoirs by Petr Martjanov, who was in military service in Omsk 'ostrog' at the time of Dostoevsky's exile. According to Martjanov's reminiscences, Dostoevsky in his Siberian sojourn "refused to read the books brought to him even by young people, and only twice developed his indulged his imaginative needs by reading David Copperfield and The Posthumous Papers of Pickwick Club in translations by Irinarch Vvedensky" .
While living outside Russia, Dostoevsky drew the attention of his wife, Anna Grigorjevna (whose reading he both encouraged and supervised), to the works of Dickens. Joking about their poverty during the Dresden period, Dostoevsky refers to himself as "Mr. Micawber" and to Anna Grigorjevna as "Mrs. Micawber." Anna Dostoevskaya recalls that "Dickens's sense of humour was part of our life. We endured our poverty resignedly, sometimes careless[ly]." She noted in her diary during May 1867 that her husband borrowed from a Dresden library The Old Curiosity Shop in French, but refused the offer of a copy of David Copperfield because he had already read it. In Dresden both Fyodor Michailovitch and Anna Grigoryevna read Dickens in French and Russian translations.Although Dostoevsky read David Copperfield several times, the only character from that lengthy bildungsroman whom he mentioned in his notes, letters, and diaries is Mr. Micawber. In a 25 March 1870 letter to A. N. Maikov he compared his circumstances to those of one of the chief characters of David Copperfield (1849-50): "I am positively in a terrible situation now (Mr. Micawber). Not a kopek of money" (Letters, ed. A. S. Dolinin, 2: 262). This self-identification with the ever-optimistic clerk instead of the soul-searching novelist David Copperfield shows the depth of Dostoevsky's sympathy with and appreciation of Dickens's characters and their situations — the allusion even reveals a Dickensian sense of humour in a writer almost universally regarded as dour! Dostoevsky's daughter, Lyubov' Dostoevskaya, wrote in her Memoirs:
When our father went to Ems, he was not able to read himself because of his work, [so] he made our mother, Anna Grigoryevna, read aloud [to him the works of] Walter Scott and Dickens, this Great Christian, as my father called him in his Diary of a Writer. During the dinner time my father asked us whether we were impressed by Dickens's novels and [whether we] recollected the episodes from Dickens's works. My father, who forgot the second name of his wife and the face of his sweetheart, remembered the names of all the characters from Dickens's and Walter Scott novels. . . .
D. A. Averkiev, the Russian dramatist, critic, and publisher of Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer in 1885-1886, discussing Dostoevsky's paper "About Predestination of Christianity in Art" ("O prednaznatchenii christianstva v iskusstve") wrote:
In Dostoevsky's opinion, what was the [primary] task of "Christian Art"? Not only in the influence of Christian ideas on an artist, but in the selection of plots, in the appeal of art to the depiction of injured, humiliated . . . and Dostoevsky considered Dickens as a founder of this direction [trend] in literature. [Diary of a Writer, 12th installment]
E. A. Stakenshneyder, the owner of the literary salon in St. Petersburg, writing in her diary on 6 February 1884, was more succinct: "The favourite writer of Dostoevsky was Dickens." In her Memoirs she enumerated "the main similar features in the works of both writers�sophisticated plots, a great numbers of characters, Our Mutual Friend, for instance. . ." (Stakenschneyder 456), which can be explained by the close affinity of their world perception, similar philosophical and social positions based on Christian principles of love and compassion which predetermines the similarity between their aesthetic and moral strivings. In Dickens's novels, Dostoevsky found the idea about what Dickens in Hard Times (1854) described as the "wisdom of the heart" (the so-called "principal mind"), which involves compassion for the insulted and injured, and leads to a spiritual resurrection for those characters such as Thomas Gradgrind and Ebenezer Scrooge, whose callous hearts and hard souls are softened by the influence of love and compassion.
As one of Dostoevsky's spiritual counterparts, Dickens played a significant role in the development of Russian writer's literary imagination. What made Dickens's novels of particular interest for Dostoevsky as he wrote his own work? The attitude both writers express towards the social issues of crime and punishment is an important indicator of a socio-cultural consciousness they shared. Take, for example, Dickens's method of depicting of criminal psychology in his works in a warped character such as Jonas Chuzzlewit (in Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843). Dickens's psychological analysis of the malefactor's consciousness and motivations attracted the attention of Russian critics such as G. Larosh (writing under the pseudonym "L. Nelyubov"), who observed that "Dickens entered in the new area of depicting crime and subconscious impulses of human psyche [soul]" (Kulischer, 5: 94).
In 1912 at a congress of Russian lawyers convened specifically to investigate criminal psychology, E. Kulischer, an outstanding Russian attorney, delivered a speech entitled "Dickens as a Criminalist," which he dedicated to Dickens's centenary jubilee (1912 marking the hundredth anniversary of Dickens's birth). In this speech he underscored the notion that "Dickens in his works anticipated new ideas in criminal law, and the description of criminal mentality in Dickens's characters paved the way for a new understanding of a criminal as a human being with a specific psycho type" (5: 94) or mindset.The destruction of the moral aspect of the personality wrought by guilt and the perpetration of criminal acts, particularly murder, are frequent subjects in Dostoevsky's and in Dickens's later novels. Investigating the approach to the question of whether Dickens inspired Dostoevsky in his descriptions of criminal psychology, we must endeavor to draw parallels, for example, between the characters of Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment) and Bradley Headstone (in Our Mutual Friend); such a parallel is the basis of an article by an outstanding nineteenth-century Russian critic, N. N. Strakhov, "O Prestuplenii i nakasanii" ("About Crime and Punishment"), published in Otechestvennye Zapiski in April 1867.