An infinitely weaker idea than Don Quixote
bands), it is clear, as Angus Wilson re
minds us, that Dostoevsky drank deeply of
what he recognized as the well of Dic
kens's spirituality. The connection between
them as urban novelists has long been
obvious; the spiritual connection, which
embraces the sense of the absurd which
pervades the work of both, seems to have
proved more elusive to most critics.
The spiritual Dickens who we can now see
as influencing Russias two greatest nove
lists was not to find particular favour in
the twentieth-century successor to the
Czar's Empire. On the eve of the Revolu
tion in 1916, however, William Lyon
Phelps recorded that prisoners in Siberia
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