THE RUSSIAN IMPACT ON ENGLISH FICTION

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28252, 13 April 1957, Page 3

THE RUSSIAN IMPACT ON ENGLISH FICTION

[Reviewed by

H.L.G.

The Russian Novel in English Fiction. By Gilbert Phelps, M.A formerly Strathcona Research Student and Assistant Supervisor in English Studies. St. Johns College, Cambridge. Hutchinson's University Library. 208 pp.

This new Hutchinson s University Library volume is a thorough and very useful study of the Russian Nove! in English translation. While it is always admitted that the influence of the great Russian novelists on English fiction. as on European fiction, has been of the first importance, there has hitherto been no close analysis of their impact. Critics seem to have decided, like the Times Literary Supplement" of 1930. that it was “not perhaps a strictly definable legacy; it was something in the air, a layer of the atmosphere.” Mr Phelps's work demonstrates that the legacy is. on the contrary, both definable and quite obviously traceable in the work of individual English writers.

A true picture of the Russian influence depends, in Mr Phelps's view, on the correction of two distortions that arose as a result of the publication of Constance Garnett's translation of “The Brothers Karamazov" in 1912, an event which was the startingpoint of the Dostoyevsky cult in particular and of the Russian fever in general. The first step must be to remove the emphasis from Dostoyevsky and place it on Turgenev. The second step is to recognise that, in spite of the poor existing translations, there was a definite Russian influence ®n English fiction long before 1912.

Mr Phelps finds this influence first in Turgenevs visits to England from 1847 to 1881. Turgenev's excellent knowledge of English and English literature, his interest in outdoor life and his humane liberalism, as well as the new kind of realism in his novels, found him a wide circle of English admirers. Mr Phelps notes his temperamental affinity and warm friendship with George Eliot, and examines in interesting detail the influence of his work on the novels of George Gissing George Moore and Henry James.' James, indeed, as an old man acknowledged Turgenev and Corot as the major influences of his ht 6 the” have revealed to me all that I need to know.” In the twentieth century the influence of Turgenev remained pervasive, in spite of the Dostoyevsky cult. He was “the novelist's novelist” in James's phrase, and writers as diverse Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf continued to read and reread him, with marked effect on their own writing. His “essential humanity” as opposed to Dos toyevsky’s “stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions” was what evoked Conrad’s passionate adI miration. With Conrad as with [ Galsworthy, as Mr Phelps demonstrates, this admiration of Turgenev was not merely “a case of lip-service” but “a deep and i abiding influence.”

The second half of Mr Phelps’s book is devoted to the influence of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, with some final brief 'but illuminating comments on that of Chekhov and Gorky. Tolstoy’s influence was strongest in its political aspects. As “the Rousseau of his time” he stirred the English conscience profoundly, and was deeply admired as the strongest counterweight to the arguments of Science and Rationalism that the age produced. G. B. Shaw was particularly strongly influenced by him. In the technique of fiction, the great scope and majestic breadth of his works influenced many English writers and stands behind the many sagas the modern English novel has produced Dostoyevsky, before 1912, was noi attractive to English readers: his apparently shapeless fictional methods were not understood by those accustomed to the traditional forms of nineteenth-century English fiction, and his absorption with suffering, poverty and wretchedness seemed as yet alien tc the spirit of the times. But as the twentieth century advanced signs of his eventual triumph

d ' SteveKon had indeed responded to him and t t ? yevsklan themes in "Dr S ” and Mr. Hyde" and “Markthat\« and G ‘, ss,n K had claimed I that as a realist he was vastly ° r t to Dl , ckens - And the way Dmi?H S M yeV^y Y as P re P a red by Dmitri Merezhovsky who enjoyed ■ c ™ sider ahle vogue in England “ ,‘ he e ? rly years of the twenMr h phJ? y and who helped, as Mr Phelps reminds his readers larv P tihaf lde the . mystical vocabu-' tary that was to be put to such energetic use a few years later." thL 1 y ,as the war of 1914-18 J?t.transformed the growing enthusiasm for Dostoyevsky into **f° r many years,” savs Mr Phelps, "the Dostoyevsky cult was an emotional necessity,” and anything like a balanced view of his work became impossible And ? ve " though the hysteria began to die down about 1920, nearly all twentieth century writing about PnuZ 7 an u C J‘ me and Political intrigue, whether in England or L merica was strongly influenced by Dostoyevsky’s evocations of gloom and misery, his formula of utter squalor combined with Christian charity, and his mystical. visions of the brotherhood of humamty and the Russian soul. And his technique had a great influence on the breakdown of traditional forms and the adoption of stream-of-consciousness and other looser experimental forms. Mr Phelps gives many excellent examples from imitators of Dostoyevsky, both major and minor. And he also traces the reaction against him, quoting Gosse’s outburst that “this epileptic monster” is “the cocaine and morphia of modern literature,” and '■ecalling D. H. Lawrence’s attacks on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He never denies their power as writers, but ip asserting Turgenev’s greater value and importance as an influence, he puts the whole subject in its proper perspective.