Dickens and Dostoevsky.

 

Charles Dickens & Fyodor Dostoevsky

I have read most of Dostoevsky's major novels twice and though I enjoyed reading them, I don't think they changed my life or had a profound effect on me. Crime and Punishment is a cracking novel and possibly one of the best of all novels.

I once asked a Russian woman if Russian people were like the characters in a Dostoevsky novel. She said are English people like the characters in a Dickens novel. Dostoevsky seemed to believe that the Russian people had a craving for suffering and delighted in their afflictions. In his 'Diary of a Writer', he wrote: "Even in happiness there is in the Russian people and element of suffering; otherwise, felicity to them is incomplete."  

English people aren't really like the characters in a Dickens novel but they are representative of a type of English person that we can often recognise.  I've never met a Mrs Gamp or a Wilkins Micawber, or a Harold Skimpole. They say Dickens modelled many of his characters on family and friends. They have called Dostoyevsky the Russian Dickens, but as an author, Dostoevsky is far more profound. He's more of a psychological writer.

I believe Dickens's novels were very popular in Russia and Dostoevsky wrote: "We, however, understand Dickens when rendered into Russian, almost as well as the English - perhaps, even all the nuances. Moreover, we love him - perhaps not less than his own countrymen. And yet, how typical, original and national is Dickens. What can be derived from this."

I believe that the 1952 film of The Pickwick Papers that was first screened in the Soviet Union in July 1954, was a great success. I have often wondered what the Russians made of that rogue Alfred Jingle and how his words translate into Russian.