were still keen Dickens readers. In one jail
where records were kept of prisoners'
reading the minutes for 1914 note that of
the British authors borrowed from the
prison library books by Dickens were
taken out no less than 192 times (while
Scott scored 98, H.G. Wells 53 and Sha
kespeare only 33!). If all of these writers
(even Wells) were acceptable to the Cza-
rist authorities, they were equally so to the
new Bolshevist regime. If, however, the
respect for Dickens as a 'social realist'
was general amongst new Soviet critics,
one aspect of his art proved to be unac
ceptable to the most prominent of Bolshe
viks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. As Lenin's
wife Nadezhda Krupskaya relates of the
early 1920s: 'Lenin went to see a dramati
zed version of The Cricket on the Hearth
and found Dickens's 'middle-class senti
mentality' so intolerable that he walked out
in the middle of the scene'. At least Lenin
only walked out. One might speculate as
to the dire consequence for the theatre
company and for literature in general if it
had been Comrade Stalin who stomped out
fulminating against 'middle-class sentimen
tality'. For neither Lenin nor Stalin, nor
for any hard-headed (and hard-hearted)
Soviet critic was 'sentimentality' accepta
ble. The 'social realist' uses of Dickens
were forcefully expressed at the now
notorious Soviet Writers' Congress of
1934 (the Congress at which James Joyce's
work was so roundly condemned). Comra
de Karl Radem proclaimed:
Dickens painted an ugly picture of
the genesis of English industrial
capitalism, but Dickens was con
vinced that industrialism was a
good thing, that industrial capital
would raise England to a higher
level, and for this reason Dickens
was able to tell the approximate
truth about this reality. He toned it
down with his sentiment, but in
David Copperfteld and other works
he has painted such a picture that
even today the reader can see how
modern England came into being.
When anyone blandly mentions David
Coppetfield and other works' I for one
always suspect that they haven't read any
others. Soviet society was not exclusively
imprisoned by this narrow idea that 'senti
mentality' tones down 'social truth' (the
work of Dickens's great admirer Sergei
Eisenstein proves that there was room for
sentiment even in the midst of socialist
propaganda) but it is clear that the Christi
an Dickens beloved of Tolstoy and Dos-
toevsky was not likely to be officially
acceptable in Soviet Russia. Things are
changing now as post-Soviet Russia redis
covers and re-explores its historic roots.
At least we can remain assured that the
love of Dickens remains well-rooted there.
The ice is melting and cracking loudly as
it famously does in the early spring on the
Neva. Perhaps too in this newly 'congeni
al' spring climate a new Russian feeling
for Dickens will flourish and define itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Churchill, R.C., A Bibliography of Dickensian
Criticism (London 1975)
Forster, John, The Life of Charles Dickens (ed.
J.W.T. Ley, London, 1928)
Lucas, Victor, Tolstoy in London (London 1979)
Maud' e,Aylmer, Life of Tolstoy (London 1929)
Soviet Writers' Congress 1934; the Debate on Soci
alist Realism and Modernism (London 1977)
eds. Graham Storey and K.J. Fielding, The Letters
of Charles Dickens (The Pilgrim Edition) Vol. V
(Oxford 1981)
Troyat, Henri, Tolstoy (trans. Nancy Amphoux,
1965, London, 1970)
Wilson, Angus, Dickens and Dostoevsky (published
as a supplement to the September 1970 Dickensian)
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