'Even before [Chaim Lewis] discovered the English novelists, he was introduced to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Pushkin by a Russian revolutionary rag merchant who studied Dickens in the Whitechapel Public Library and read aloud from Man and Superman. Another friend - the son of a widowed mother, who left school at fourteen - exposed him to Egyptology, Greek architecture, Scott, Smollett, the British Musuem and Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Chaim Lewis Print: Book
'The son of a barely literate Derbyshire collier recalled a sister, a worker in a hosiery factory, who was steeped in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, Keats and D.H. Lawrence. Their mother's reading "would astonish the modern candidate for honours in English at any university", he claimed. "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeniev, Dumas, Hugo, Thackeray, Meredith, Scott, Dickens, all the classics, poetry etc., all these gave her immense joy".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sutton Print: Book
'Ewan McColl remembered his father, a Communist ironfounder, as someone who was always giving him secondhand books. He "belonged to the generation who believed that books were tools that could open a lock which would free people..." At age eight McColl received the works of Darwin. By fifteen he had read Gogol, Dostoevsky and the entire Human Comedy: "They were a refuge from the horrors of the life around us... Unemployment in the 1930s was unbelievable, you really felt you'd never escape... So books for me were a kind of fantasy life... For me to go at the age of fourteen, to drop into the library and discover a book like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four-Sided Figure... the titles alone produced a kind of happiness in me... When I discovered Gogol in that abominable translation of Constance Garnett with those light blue bindings... I can remember the marvellous sensation of sitting in the library and opening the volume and going into that world of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin in The Overcoat or in The Nose, or The Madman's Diary. I thought I'd never read anything so marvellous, and through books I was living in many worlds simultaneously. I was living in St Petersburg and in Paris with Balzac... And I knew all the characters, Lucien de Rubempre and Rastignac as though they were my own friends".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ewan McColl Print: Book
'Once a month when [Jack Jones's] duties took him to Cardiff, he would exchange twelve to twenty books and take them home in an old suitcase. He read Tolstoy and Gork, and raced through most of Dostoevsky in a month. He was guided by a librarian who, like a university tutor, demanded an intelligent critique of everything he read'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Jack Jones Print: Book
'"Reading for me then was haphazard, unguided, practically uncritical", recalled boilermaker's daughter Marjory Todd. "I slipped all too easily into those traps for the half-baked - books about books, the old 'John O' London's Weekly', chit-chat of one kind or another". Yet in a few years she had advanced to "Moby Dick", "Lord Jim", "Crime and Punishment", and "Wuthering Heights".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Marjory Todd Print: Book
'W.J. Brown was introduced to literature by "Robinson Crusoe", "She", "The Last of the Mohicans", and "Around the World in Eighty Days", and he never moved far beyond that level. He tried "The Idiot" and "The Brothers Karamazov", but found them too depressing, perhaps because his life was anything but Dostoevskian'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William John Brown Print: Book
'W.J. Brown was introduced to literature by "Robinson Crusoe", "She", "The Last of the Mohicans", and "Around the World in Eighty Days", and he never moved far beyond that level. He tried "The Idiot" and "The Brothers Karamazov", but found them too depressing, perhaps because his life was anything but Dostoevskian'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William John Brown Print: Book
'19th September 1928 (Wednesday)
I have got nearly all my books home from the office now. It is a lengthy job, bringing them in two?s and threes, but I have had enough of lugging suitcases full of books. Nothing in the papers today except ?last words? on the ?6? power conference.
?Le Crime et le Chatiment? - (Dostoivesky); translated Victor D?r?ly'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
Virginia Woolf, on her honeymoon, to Lytton Strachey, 1 September 1912:
'You can't think with what a fury we fall on printed matter, so long denied us by our own
writing! I read 3 new novels in two days: Leonard waltzed through the Old Wives Tale like a
kitten after its tail: after this giddy career I have now run full tilt into Crime et Chatiment,
fifty pages before tea, and I see there are only 800; so I shall be through in no time. It is
directly obvious that he [Dostoevsky] is the greatest writer ever born'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 22 October 1915:
'I should think I had read 600 books since we met. Please tell me what merit you find in Henry
James. I have disabused Leonard [Woolf, husband] of him; but we have his works here, and I
read, and can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and
pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it? I admit I can't be bothered to snuff out
his meaning when it's very obscure. I am beginning the Insulted and Injured [Dostoevsky,
1862]; which sweeps me away. Have you read it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 30 August 1928:
'I am happy because it is the loveliest August [...] I read Proust, Henry James, Dostoevsky'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Tuesday 19 January 1915:
'I'm reading The Idiot. I cant bear the style of it very often; at the same time, he seems to me to have the kind of vitality in him that Scott had; only Scott merely made superb ordinary people, & D. creates wonders, with very subtle brains, & fearful sufferings. Perhaps the likeness to Scott partly consists in the loose, free & easy, style of the translation. I am also reading Michelet, plodding through the dreary middle ages; & Fanny Kemble's Life. Yesterday in the train I read The Rape of the Lock, which seems to me "supreme" -- almost superhuman
in its beauty & brilliancy -- you really can't believe such things are written down.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'Reading the Father Zossima chapter ['The Brothers Karamazov'] I felt the confessor-saint fulfilled exactly the same function as the psycho-analyst. The psycho-analyst cuts a poor and shabby figure beside the saint but he is the best substitute an age of non-faith can produce.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 August 1911:
'Les Freres Karamazov is one of the greatest of novels [...] Have you read it? & the extraordinary speech of Ivan about Christ & Christianity & socialism which goes on without stopping for about 50 pages? I am halfway through. The Agamemnon is childish compared to it. I read it in trains & on steamers in inextricable fjords & on great lakes, very slowly, as befits it, in perpetual sunshine; I shall never finish it I think or perhaps it will never end. And Edgar [Woolf] is always sitting by me reading the Ordeal of Richard Feverel [...] We went up the coast from Gotenberg towards Norway [...] Then we wandered up a fjord to a detestable town called Uddevala [...] Then we took a toy steamboat & sailed over the lake [...] to Leksamd & thence here [Raatvik]. It was pleasant to sit on deck reading Les Freres at the rate of a page an hour, gliding past the shores from which the fair haired naked men & women perpetually waved their hands to us.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 August 1911:
'Les Freres Karamazov is one of the greatest of novels [...] Have you read it? & the extraordinary speech of Ivan about Christ & Christianity & socialism which goes on without stopping for about 50 pages? I am halfway through. The Agamemnon is childish compared to it. I read it in trains & on steamers in inextricable fjords & on great lakes, very slowly, as befits it, in perpetual sunshine; I shall never finish it I think or perhaps it will never end. And Edgar [Woolf] is always sitting by me reading the Ordeal of Richard Feverel [...] We went up the coast from Gotenberg towards Norway [...] Then we wandered up a fjord to a detestable town called Uddevala [...] Then we took a toy steamboat & sailed over the lake [...] to Leksamd & thence here [Raatvik]. It was pleasant to sit on deck reading Les Freres at the rate of a page an hour, gliding past the shores from which the fair haired naked men & women perpetually waved their hands to us.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
E. M. Forster to Ottoline Morrell, 2 April 1910:
'I am reading Les Freres Karamazov, but am so far a little disappointed. It seems sketchy, though I have no notion what I mean by that useful word; not "insincere" by any means.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
'In the late 1880s Gissing immersed himself in contemporary European fiction, as he had during previous periods of his life. Gissing's wide reading has been often noted but rarely assessed. Salient in any study of it would be his reading of Goethe and Heine in 1876 (and throughout his life), Eugene Sue and Henri Murger (in 1878 "Scenes de la Vie Boheme" was deepy influential), Comte (notably "Cours de Philosophie Positive" in 1878), Turgenev (in 1884 - but also constantly, for by the end of the decade he had read "Fathers and Sons" five times), Moliere, George Sand, Balzac, de Musset (whom he called indispensable" in 1885), Ibsen (in German, in the late 1880s), Zola, Dostoevski, the Goncourts (at least by the early 1890s). Gissing read with equal ease in French, German, Greek and latin, and these from an early age. Later he added Italian and late in life some Spanish'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gissing Print: Book
'Now [after 1890] he [Gissing] read books that seemed to have had a direct impact on his development, turning him away from working-class subjects (to which he never returned) and making him more interested in the nihilistic or purely intellectual attitudes of his characters than in those of them who had a Walter Egremont type of social conscience. Thus, he re-read Bourget, on [his friend] Bertz's recommendation looked at J.P. Jacobsen's "Niels Lyhne" and "Marie Grube", reread Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" (for the seventh time), reread Dostoevski, whom he recomended to his brother but disliked himself, once again mulled over Hardy's "The Woodlanders" and "The Mayor of Casterbridge" (he later said that "Jude" was poor stuff by comparison with these), and began to ponder Ibsen, starting with "Hedda Gabler".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gissing Print: Book
'Gissing, probably more than any of his contemporaries, knew well the main trends of European literature at that time, for he continued to read widely in both French and German, as well as English. During the eighteen-eighties, he re-read George Sand and much of Balzac; read Zola for the first time; purchased cheap German editions of Turgenev and read them all; was famiiar with Daudet, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and later de Maupassant; and read Ibsen as his work became available and in the late eighties saw his plays when they were performed for the first time in London'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gissing Print: Book
'Dostoieffsky [sic] occupied our attention for the remained [sic] of the evening. We were much indebted to R.H. Robson for an interesting & valuable introduction dealing with his life as the background of his works. All his writings are in the main autobiographical & the story of his life is necessary for a study of his work. One of the main lessons of his writings is a new & deeper meaning in the term 'brotherhood'. It may be that the Russians will reveal the true democracy to the world. Readings from his novels were given by C. E Stansfield, Mrs Evans, E.E. Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Stansfield Print: Book
'Dostoieffsky [sic] occupied our attention for the remained [sic] of the evening. We were much indebted to R.H. Robson for an interesting & valuable introduction dealing with his life as the background of his works. All his writings are in the main autobiographical & the story of his life is necessary for a study of his work. One of the main lessons of his writings is a new & deeper meaning in the term 'brotherhood'. It may be that the Russians will reveal the true democracy to the world. Readings from his novels were given by C. E Stansfield, Mrs Evans, E.E. Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ernest E. Unwin Print: Book
'Dostoieffsky [sic] occupied our attention for the remained [sic] of the evening. We were much indebted to R.H. Robson for an interesting & valuable introduction dealing with his life as the background of his works. All his writings are in the main autobiographical & the story of his life is necessary for a study of his work. One of the main lessons of his writings is a new & deeper meaning in the term 'brotherhood'. It may be that the Russians will reveal the true democracy to the world. Readings from his novels were given by C. E Stansfield, Mrs Evans, E.E. Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Evans Print: Book
'Dostoieffsky [sic] occupied our attention for the remained [sic] of the evening. We were much indebted to R.H. Robson for an interesting & valuable introduction dealing with his life as the background of his works. All his writings are in the main autobiographical & the story of his life is necessary for a study of his work. One of the main lessons of his writings is a new & deeper meaning in the term 'brotherhood'. It may be that the Russians will reveal the true democracy to the world. Readings from his novels were given by C. E Stansfield, Mrs Evans, E.E. Unwin'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Reginald Robson Print: Book
'I do hope you are not too disgusted with me for not thanking you for the "[The Brothers] Karamazov" before. It was very dear of you to remember me; and of course I was extremely interested. But it's an impossible lump of valuable matter. It's terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating. Moreover I don't know what D[ostoevsky] stands for or reveals, but I do know he is too Russian for me. It sounds to me like some fierce mouthings from prehistoric ages. I uderstand that the Russians have just 'discovered' him. I wish them joy. Of course your wife's translation is wonderful.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
'I am struggling with the Brothers Karamazov, but do not find myself at home with any of the
characters. Must read something about Dostoevsky.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vere Hodgson Print: Book
