Od uzora do prezira / From admiration to contempt

D. H. Lawrence i njegov odnos prema F. M. Dostojevskom / D. H. Lawrence and his Views

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence and his views on F. M. Dostoevsky used to change gradually – from the initial admiration and fascination with the works of this great Russian literary classic, which Lawrence had read in the period of the overall popularity ‘of all things Russian’ in Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, to doubts this highly controversial and largely misunderstood British author expressed in the most prolific period of Modernism, when he began publishing his own fiction as well as some non-fictional and critical pieces on literature. The majority of critics and researchers of Lawrence and his opus argue that his denial of Dostoevsky’s importance stemmed not only from his own need to distance himself from the influence of certain works by Dostoevsky but also from his continuous fight with his innermost demons in the later phase of his creative work. It was in these moments that Lawrence sought answers to his questions in the works of other Russian authors translated into English at the time – Solovyov, Berdyaev, Shestov and Rozanov. Lawrence paid special attention to their perspective on certain books by Dostoevsky. With similar enthusiasm, he also analysed the critical explanations of Dostoevsky by his British contemporaries, such as Ford Madox Ford, Arnold Bennett, John Middleton Murry, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. This paper focuses on Lawrence’s interpretation of The Grand Inquisitor, based on two key chapters from The Brothers Karamazov and written as a preface to the English translation by Samuel Koteliansky, ‘Kot,’ a Russian émigré Jew and Lawrence’s close friend. Although gravely ill, Lawrence managed to write this text in four days in February 1930. He died a month later at Vence, Southern France. It can be argued that in this last major critical piece of his, Lawrence concluded his decades-long re-reading and questioning of the influences that Dostoevsky and other Russian classics have exerted on him, as well as on the emergence and development of British Modernist fiction between 1910 and 1930.