Dostoevsky and English modernism, 1900-1930

by Peter Kaye

"The writers who are the focus of this study - Lawrence, Woolf, Bennett, Conrad, Forster, Galsworthy, and James - either admired Dostoevsky or feared him as 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."--Jacket.