As early as 1849 the Russian critic Alex
ander Druzhinin remarked on similarities
between Dickens's childhood and that of
Tolstoy's great literary contemporary,
Fedor Dostoevsky. In the 1840s Dos-
toevsky, much to the chagrin of latter-day
denigrators of the novel, had become
fascinated by The Old Curiosity Shop and
spell-bound by the character of Little Nell.
Perhaps what most impressed the Russian
writer was the sense of wandering and
rootlessness which permeates the book,
though some readers might also recognize
something particularly sympathetic to
Russians in Dickens's play with contrasted
emotions and lurches between laughter and
tears. Parallels between Dickens and Dos
toevsky have continued to impress them
selves on a considerable range of twen
tieth-century critics, notably Stefan Zweig
in 1920, Ernest Radlov in 1922, André
Gide in 1923 and Aldous Huxley in 1930
(though Huxley complained that Nell's
death was handled in a vastly inferior way
compared to the death of Iliusha in The
Brothers Karamazov). In 1931 Edmund
Wilson not only blamed 'Bloomsbury'
critics for ignoring Dickens's influence on
Dostoevsky but also objected that 'Dickens
is not sufficiently conscious of the signifi
cance of what happens he has admitted
a larger conventional element than the
greatest novelists [i.e. such as Dostoevsky]
ordinarily allow'. The most detailed and
fascinating comparison between the two
novelists was that drawn in a Dickens
Memorial Lecture in 1970 by a third
novelist, Angus Wilson. It was Angus
Wilson who also drew attention to the fact
that George Gissing, himself a great Dic-
kensian and an early English admirer of
Dostoevsky, had recognized an essential
mutuality which was not immediately
detrimental to Dickens.
Dostoevsky was familiar with Dickens's
early fiction before the time of his enfor
ced exile to Siberia in 1849. At the Omsk
penal settlement he had both Pickwick and
David Copperfield at his bedside when he
was ill in the prison hospital (this was to
be his first experience of Copperfield). In
1867 his wife records that the impoveris
hed novelist sought out second-hand copies
of Dickens on the book-stalls of Dresden
and a year later Dostoevsky, then at work
on The Idiot, wrote to his niece from
Switzerland concerning certain parallels
his character, Prince Myshkin, and Samuel
Pickwick: 'although Pickwick is an infini
tely weaker idea than Don Quixote, it is
still an enormous creation it is also
funny and succeeds just by that'. His
appreciation of Dickens's work is also
evident in the generally xenophobic, Sla
vophile articles he contributed to Russian
journals in his middle years. Speaking of
the unintelligibility of Russian themes and
Russian mores to Western Europe he
moves on to refer to the easy acclimati
zation of Dickens in Russia:
We understand Dickens when
rendered into Russian, almost as
well as the English, perhaps not
less than his countrymen Is such
an understanding of other nationali
ties a special gift of the Russians,
as compared with Europeans?
Perhaps. Perhaps such a special gift
actually exists and if it exists it is
very significant carrying great
promise for the future, one that
predestines Russians to many a
thing, although I don't know whe
ther it is a good gift or whether it
is bad.
Essentially for Dostoevsky Dickens was a
Christian writer. In comparing him to
George Sand in another article he insists
that Sand 'did not like to depict in her
novels humble people, righteous but yiel
ding, religious zealots and downtrodden
folk such as appear in almost every novel
of the great Christian, Charles Dickens'.
However hard it may seem to some rea
ders to identify Dickens's benign 'religious
zealots' (they are certainly not the Chad-
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