Dostoevsky and English Modernism 1900-1930

When Constance Garnett''s translations (191020) made Dostoevsky''s novels accessible in England for the first time they introduced a disruptive and liberating literary force and English novelists had to confront a new model and rival. The writers who are the focus of this study - Lawrence Woolf Bennett Conrad Forster Galsworthy and James - either admired or feared Dostoevsky as a 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.