When Dickens Met Dostoevsky (2013) | Hacker News Reader

When Dickens Met Dostoevsky (2013)

the-tls.co.uk

52 pointslermontov10 comments

I read this back when it came out. It's an awesome detective story. The central question is why would someone perpetrate such a minor fraud. It is like art forgery but you can't sell it.

You have to get into the fraudster's head, which the article does to a degree. The resulting answer isn't rational in the sense that you would agree with. The fraudster doesn't get anything but rather damages something. You come to an empirical understanding, according to the facts presented, of a minor mediocrity passed over by life and striking back.

There's also https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/10/man-behind-dic....

> “that the letter isn’t genuine, which is rather sad, because the idea of the two men meeting is so wonderful.”

I may be biased, but to me Dickens looks like a bit of a hack publishing serials in newspapers, and Dostoevsky one of those serious writers dropping deep books once in a while.

Serials was a common way to publish novels in those days though. Dostoevskys books was also first serialized in magazines.

Yep, I read Hesse's accusations about "l'age du feuilleton" and got the picture, but somehow the Russians seemed out of it.

Rocambole (French serials) still lends his name to adjectives ...

Dostoevsky did publish in serials! This is related to a story. Before he finished Crime and Punishment, which was being serialized, he had to write a whole other novel in order to prevent an unscrupulous publisher from capturing the rights to all his future work. In the end he was saved by dictating The Gambler to a young woman named Anna Snitkina who was the star pupil at the local shorthand academy (shorthand being a hot innovation at the time). During the day, he would work on finishing Crime and Punishment while she worked on transcribing The Gambler. In the evenings, he would dictate the next bit of The Gambler and she would get it in shorthand. They would talk about the characters too.

They finished at the last possible moment. The publisher had cunningly closed his office that day and ordered all his staff not to receive the manuscript, so Dostoevsky went to the local police station, handed it in, and got a receipt. Thus his career was rescued. And then he and Anna got married.

It's fitting that this drama produced The Gambler (a great short book btw!), since the entire episode was a high-stakes gamble, and Dostoevsky a notorious gambling addict. The marriage was a long and happy one and his life stabilized after that. His books maybe got a tad less exciting.

Joseph Frank's biography is the best English source but he spends too many pages on this for a Google Books link to be useful. This one works though: https://books.google.com/books?id=1C1K-BnFGFIC&pg=PA51&dq=do...

Re serials: it's mind blowing that so many great masterpieces of the novel were written and published that way, and yet are so coherent, Dickens included. How on earth did they do it? The unconscious is a consummate planner.

schooled, dagnabbit!

;-)

Even Don Quixote was published in two parts, separated by a decade. In fact, there was so much clamoring for a sequel that someone else wrote a sequel and then Cervantes spends a bit of time (Chapter 59) in part two dealing with the author, Avellaneda.

BTW, if you like Russian literature, I recommend Possessed by Elif Batuman. It is her reading of Russian lit and a recounting of her travels in Russia and Turkey during graduate school at Stanford.

I got the glimpse of the demise of the Soviet empire (1970s+) - the literature revolved around monthly magazines. It wasn't hard to subscribe to one. They would publish homemade and overseas masterpieces in chunks. So we would wait until the end of a piece, rip it from the magazines and bind it in a book. I never thought about it, but it seems that serial writing/publishing was natural in those days. I suspect it has deeper roots.

When I read Crime and Punishment, I realised many of what I saw as flaws could be explained by the fact that it was published as a serial. You can't retcon what's already released.

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