D. H. Lawrence's response to Russian literature 9783111392707, 9783111030203

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STUDIES IN ENGLISH

LITERATURE

Volume LXIX

D. H. LAWRENCE'S RESPONSE TO RUSSIAN LITERATURE by

GEORGE J . Z Y T A R U K Nipissing College, Laurentian University

1971 MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1971 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 76-141185

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

"Yes, the Russian novelists have meant a great deal to me..." D. H. Lawrence

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In its initial form this book was presented as a doctoral dissertation to the Graduate School of the University of Washington, Seattle (1965). Chapters I and V have previously been published in The D. H. Lawrence Review and in Comparative Literature Studies, respectively. I wish to thank the editors, James C. Cowan and Alfred Owen Aldridge, for permission to make use of the material here. I am grateful to Mr. Laurence Pollinger, representative of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, for permission to quote from D. H. Lawrence's works. For permission to use quotations from the various editions of D. H. Lawrence, I express my thanks to the Viking Press, New York, and to William Heinemann Limited, London. I wish to thank the Board of Governors of Nipissing College for financial assistance that has enabled me to complete this book. For assistance with the preparation of the manuscript, I am grateful to Delores Klingspon and to my wife JoAnn.

PREFACE

This study of D. H. Lawrence's Response to Russian Literature is an attempt to explore his reading of and reaction to the Russians. In order to do so, it is necessary first to determine as accurately as possible how well acquainted Lawrence was with Russian literature in translation. Having done that, I will proceed to describe his response to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and V. V. Rozanov. I do not suggest that, in any major sense, Lawrence's fiction has its origins in his reading of Russian literature; such a suggestion would be irresponsible and certainly untenable. The origins of art are always obscure, but in the course of this study I plan to indicate how in several instances at least our appreciation of Lawrence's fiction is enhanced by a knowledge of his reaction to the Russians. I do not attempt a full scale comparison of Lawrence's ideas with those of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Rozanov, although I do not doubt that such a comparison would prove valuable in assessing Lawrence's thought; nor is it my intention to evaluate Lawrence's artistic achievement by setting his works beside those of the great Russian novelists. Such studies properly belong to the field of comparative literature. The focus of this study, at all times, will be on Lawrence as a reader of Russian literature, as a literary critic, and as an artist. My aim is to try to describe in what sense "the Russian novelists have meant a great deal" to Lawrence and how he felt about the Russians whom he read. To this end I intend to bring together as many as possible of Lawrence's critical pronouncements on the Russians; but I do not wish to become involved in assessing the value of these pronouncements as universal literary criticism; rather, I want to

10

PREFACE

establish the nature of Lawrence's unique response to Russian literature and the part which this response plays in his own efforts as a writer. Nipissing College (Affiliated withLaurentian University) North Bay, Ontario, Canada

GEORGE JOHN ZYTARUK

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

7

Preface

9

Abbreviations I. II.

D. H. Lawrence's Reading of Russian Literature . . .

12 13

D. H. Lawrence's Role as a Translator of Russian Literature

38

III.

D. H. Lawrence's Response to Tolstoy

64

IV.

D. H. Lawrence and the Dostoevsky Cult

V.

The Phallic Vision: D. H. Lawrence and

VI.

104

V. V. Rozanov

144

Conclusion

169

Bibliography of Works Cited

178

Index

186

ABBREVIATIONS

The titles of works most frequently quoted in the text and in the notes have been abbreviated as follows: A.P.R. C.B. C.L. F. L. M. W.D. P. Q.R. R. R.F. S. S.L.C. S.M.

E. T. (Jessie Chambers), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record Edward Nehls, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography The CollectedLetters of D.H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious The Letters ofD. H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died, reprinted in The Short Novels Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence The Quest for Rananim: D. H. Lawrence's Letters to S. S. Koteliansky D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays Donald Davie, ed., Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature D.H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism D. H. Lawrence, The Symbolic Meaning

Full publication information is given in the Bibliography.

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D. H. L A W R E N C E ' S R E A D I N G OF RUSSIAN L I T E R A T U R E

D. H. Lawrence was an adept student of languages. Besides Latin, French, and German which he studied at the University of Nottingham from 1906 to 1908, Lawrence later learned Italian and Spanish. Despite some shortcomings, his translations of the Italian writer Giovanni Verga are still regarded as among the best renderings of this artist's work in English. A t one time in his career Lawrence began to learn Russian in preparation for a journey to Soviet Russia. 1 Although this journey never materialized, and Lawrence's study of Russian did not proceed beyond the rudimentary stages, his reading of Russian literature in English translations played a significant part in his development as a writer. Something of the importance which Lawrence himself placed on his reading of the Russian writers may be gathered from his letter to Catherine Carswell dated 2 December 1916: Oh, don't think I would belittle the Russians. They have meant an enormous amount to me; Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky - mattered almost The plans for the Russian journey may be traced in Lawrence's letters. "I feel that our chiefest hope for the future is Russia... We will go to Russia. Send me a Berlitz grammar book, I will begin to learn the language - religiously" (to S. S. Koteliansky? 15 May 1917, C.L., 1,513); "I think I should like to go to Russia in the summer. After America, it appeals to me" (to Catherine Carswell 17 December 1922, C.L., II, 733); "I might go to Russia. Would you like to go with me? I've even learned my Russian A.B.C." (to Witter Bynner 27 January 1926, C.L., II, 885); "I am even learning a bit of Russian, to go to Russia; though whether that will really come off, I don't know" (to Dorothy Brett 2 February 1926, C.L., II, 886); "I don't want to go to Russia now: I hear such dreary tales about it from people in Florence" (to S. S. Koteliansky 10 April 1926, C.L., II, 896); "My desire to go to Russia has disappeared again" (to S. S. Koteliansky 17 May 1926, C.L., II, 912). 1

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D. H. L A W R E N C E ' S R E A D I N G OF R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E

more than anything, and I thought them the greatest writers of all time. And now, with something of a shock, I realise a certain crudity and thick, uncivilised, insensitive stupidity about them, I realise how much finer and purer and more ultimate our own stuff is (L., 383-84). In these words Lawrence gives us at once not only his critical evaluation of the three great Russian novelists but also the fundamental nature of his response to them. We see that this response is in its most inclusive form ambivalent: he is simultaneously attracted and repelled. The major part of this study will be an attempt to explore in some detail Lawrence's ambivalent feelings about Russian literature, but before such a task can legitimately be undertaken, it is necessary first to establish the degree to which Lawrence was read in the vast body of Russian literature. What kind of a reader Lawrence was, when he first began to read the Russians, on which writers he concentrated, with whom he discussed his reading, these are the questions which must now be answered. From the accounts of people who knew him, we know that Lawrence was an omnivorous reader. The most extensive account of his early reading is given in D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by E. T. (Jessie Chambers) who describes what Lawrence read during the six or seven years of their friendship. Jessie Chambers recalled that Lawrence brought her "his own copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina" which he said "was the greatest novel in the world" (A.P.R., 114). A s a schoolmaster in Croydon, Lawrence was considered well-read. Helen Corke, who knew him during this period, tells of Lawrence's habit of bringing books to her attention. "The books he brought me now", she says, referring to the year 1911, "were French and Russian authors: Maupassant, Flaubert, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Tolstoy and Turgeniev." 2 A fellow school teacher of this same period, A. W. McLeod, remarks on Lawrence's appetite for books: "He read everything he could lay hands on plays, verse, and novels especially - from Ibsen, Verhaeren and Peacock to so humble a writer as Mary M a n n " (C.B., I, 90). Finally, we have the voluminous correspondence of Lawrence himself; his letters are filled with requests for books, comments about 2

Helen Corke, "D. H. Lawrence as I Saw Him", Renaissance and Modern

Studies, IV (i960), 11.

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writers whom he has read, and comments on books he is reading at a particular moment. Lawrence, however, was more than a reader of Russian literature; his inability to read Russian works in the original language notwithstanding, Lawrence was also a translator. How extensive was his role as a translator? An attempt to answer this question will form the second chapter of this study. Beyond the roles of reader and translator, Lawrence was an insistent critic of Russian literature. Had his projected journey to Soviet Russia been accomplished he might well have produced a series of essays on "Classic Russian Literature" comparable to his penetrating and still provocative essays Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923) and The Symbolic Meaning (New York, 1964). Indeed, Witter Bynner, who knew Lawrence during the time of the projected Russian journey, has said: This impulse of his to visit still another country seems to me now to have sprung from his obsessive hope that in some land on earth he might find the worthy human species he was looking for. I had realized by this time that though he was always "walking away from something," he was also always walking toward something. Dostoyevsky had insistently proclaimed superior natural worth in the Russian peasant; and I believe that the later novelist was drawn to Russia in hopes of seeing there what the earlier had seen. It might have been the last Lawrencian quest. A n d yet, almost in the same breath with laudation, the Russian novelist acknowledged his peasant to be a cruel, disappointing lout. Lawrence may have more than suspected by now that mankind is pretty much the same, the world over. His report on the Slavs might have been his best b o o k ; but he never went to Russia. 3

Despite the lack of a definitive volume of criticism devoted to Russian literature, it is possible to assemble from numerous sources a rather large body of Lawrence criticism and to determine with some accuracy Lawrence's critical posture with respect to the Russians. His role as a critic of Russian literature will therefore also form part of this study. Before proceeding to this task, however, we shall first examine Lawrence's roles as a reader and a translator. 8

Witter Bynner, Journey With Genius (London, Peter Nevill Ltd., 1953), 328.

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D. H. L A W R E N C E ' S R E A D I N G OF R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E

I It may not be possible now to determine exactly when D. H. Lawrence first began reading Russian literature in translation, but there is evidence that by 1908 he was already familiar with some of the work of Tolstoy. In a letter to May Chambers dated as early as 2 December 1908, we find a reference to Tolstoy: "The true heart of the world is a book; there are sufficient among your acquaintances to make a complete world, but you must learn from books how to know them... Read, my dear, read Balzac and Ibsen & Tolstoi and think about them; don't take offence at them; they were great men, all, & who are we that we should curl our lips" (C.B., III, 612). We know that Lawrence's reading of Tolstoy preceded his reading of Dostoevsky, for in a letter to Blanche Jennings dated 8 May 1909 Lawrence says: I have just finished Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment - which he - J. M. Robertson - considers the finest book written - I believe you told me so - at any rate I read it somewhere. He is a poor fool. He has called me a fool often enough in his damned "Letters on Reasoning" and such like, but now it's my turn - he's an arrant ass to declare Crime and Punishment the greatest book - it is a tract, a treatise, a pamphlet compared with Tolstoi's Anna Karenina or War and Peace. Read Anna Karenina - no

matter, read it again, and if you dare to fall out with it, I'll - I'll swear aloud (C.L., I, 53-54). From the above quotation it is clear that Lawrence must have begun reading the Russians with one of the two major novels of Tolstoy and later gone on to the work of Dostoevsky. As my discussion will show, he continued to read the Russians throughout his life. It is noteworthy that in one of his last essays, his "Introduction" to S. S. Koteliansky's translation of Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor, Lawrence tells us that he has been rereading Dostoevsky's The Brothers KaramazovA We know that Lawrence read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace, but what else from among Tolstoy's voluminous literary The "Introduction" was first published in S. S. Koteliansky's translation The Grand Inquisitor (London, Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1930). The "Introduction" is now readily available in S.L.C., 233-41. 4

D. H. L A W R E N C E '

R E A D I N G OF R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E

17

output did Lawrence also read? A third work by Tolstoy which Lawrence read is The Kreutzer Sonata to which he refers approvingly in a letter dated 2 December 1913. The letter, addressed to Henry Savage, reads in part: "I should love Fumeurs i f Opium - they are the books that fascinate me - the raw material of Art. That's why I liked Kreutzer Sonata - it is exactly what Tolstoi thought [Lawrence's italics] he experienced - and jolly truthful too - but not art. But it interests me" (C.L., I, 250). Another work by Tolstoy to which Lawrence specifically refers is Resurrection. In an undated essay, first published in Phoenix (1936), Lawrence states: "I have just read, for the first time, Tolstoy's Resurrection. Tolstoy writhed very hard, on the Cross. His Resurrection is the step into the tomb. And the stone was rolled upon him" (P., 737). Further evidence for his reading of Resurrection is to be found in his essay "The Novel" which was published in the collection entitled Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (Philadelphia, 1925). In addition to the four major novels of Tolstoy just cited, Lawrence probably also read a good deal of biographical material about the great Russian novelist. S. S. Koteliansky, whose relations with Lawrence will be discussed in Chapter II, was responsible for a large number of translations of Russian works into English. From Lawrence's letters it is clear that Koteliansky was in the habit of sending Lawrence copies of his translations as soon as these were published. Thus in a letter to Koteliansky dated 8 August 1922, written from Australia, Lawrence says: "Countess Tolstoi came two days ago - have read her - rather sad, & a bit ridiculous: very interesting" ({?.!?., 246). And in another letter, dated 22 June 1923, written from Mexico, Lawrence says: "The Dostoevsky and Tolstoy books have come: and many thanks" (C.L., II, 747). The book referred to in the first of these letters is The Autobiography of Countess Tolstoi, translated by S. S. Koteliansky in 1922; the books in the second letter are Tolstoys Love Letters, translated by S. S. Koteliansky in 1923 and Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences (1923); Koteliansky also translated Talks with Tolstoy by A . B. Goldenveizer (1923), and it is likely that Lawrence read this as well. Besides the Koteliansky translations just mentioned, Lawrence

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D. H. L A W R E N C E ' S R E A D I N G OF RUSSIAN L I T E R A T U R E

also read some other biographical material about Tolstoy. One such biographical work is Reminiscences of Tolstoy (London and New York, 1914) by Tolstoy's son, Count Ilya Tolstoy. The evidence for Lawrence's reading of this work is to be found in his "Study of Thomas Hardy", the third version of which was written some time in February, 1916. In Count Ilya Tolstoy's reminiscences there is a reference to his father's feelings about the novel Anna Karenina; Count Ilya Tolstoy recalls: "What difficulty is there in writing about how an officer fell in love with a married woman?" he used to say. "There's no difficulty in it and above all no good in it." 5 That Lawrence had these words in mind is obvious from the following passage in his "Study of Thomas Hardy": Reading the reminiscences of Tolstoi, one can only feel shame at the way Tolstoi denied all that was great in him, with vehement cowardice. H e degraded himself infinitely, he perjured himself far more than did Peter when he denied Christ. Peter repented. But Tolstoi denied the Father, and propagated a great system of his recusancy, elaborating his own weakness, blaspheming his own strength. " W h a t difficulty is there in writing about how an officer fell in love with a married w o m a n ? " he used t o say o f his Anna Karenina; "there's no difficulty in it, and, above all, no good in i t " (P., 479).

Lawrence reproduces almost verbatim the last sentence in the above quotation from Count Ilya Tolstoy's account, and this unwonted accuracy on Lawrence's part indicates that he must have quoted directly from the Reminiscences of Tolstoy. In Lawrence's book Reflections on the Death of A Porcupine and Other Essays (Philadelphia, 1925) is an essay entitled "The Novel", which is largely an attack on Tolstoy's Resurrection. Referring to Tolstoy, Lawrence writes: Secretly, Leo worshipped the human male, man as a column of rapacious and living blood. He could hardly meet three lusty, roisterous young guardsmen in the street, without crying with envy: and ten minutes later,

5 Reminiscences of Tolstoy by his son Count Ilya Tolstoy, translated by George Calderon (New York, The Century Co., 1914), 144-45.

D. H. L A W R E N C E ' S R E A D I N G OF RUSSIAN L I T E R A T U R E

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fulminating 011 them black oblivion and annihilation, utmost moral thunder-bolts. 6

This outburst against Tolstoy appears to be based on a rather imperfect recollection of the following passage, which Lawrence probably read about five years previously in S. S. Koteliansky's English translation of Maxim Gorky's Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi: Suler tells how he was once walking with L e o Nikolayevitch [Tolstoy] in Tverskaya Street when Tolstoi noticed in the distance two soldiers of the Guards. The metal of their accoutrements shone in the sun; their spurs jingled; they kept step like one man; their faces, too, shone with the selfassurance of strength and youth. Tolstoi began to grumble at them: " W h a t pompous stupidity! Like animals trained by the whip. But when the guardsmen came abreast with him, he stopped, followed them caressingly with his eyes and said enthusiastically: " H o w handsome! Old Romans, eh, Liovushka? Their strength and beauty! O h L o r d ! H o w charming it is when man is handsome, how very charming!" 7

Lawrence's recollection of his reading about Tolstoy's meeting with the guardsmen provides an interesting insight into the working of Lawrence's imagination. Instead of the two guardsmen, whom Gorky's account mentions, Lawrence recalls three; in Gorky's description, Tolstoy fulminates first, then praises the soldiers, but in Lawrence's version the order of Tolstoy's reactions is reversed; finally, Gorky says nothing of Tolstoy's tears on this occasion, but Lawrence has Tolstoy "crying with envy". Besides the four major novels and the biographical materials we have just mentioned, Lawrence also appears to have been familiar with Tolstoy's essay "What is Art?" Writing to S. S. Koteliansky on 21 December 1928, Lawrence asks: "Could you ask any of the booksellers to send me at once, with the bill, a copy of Roger Fry's Cézanne book. It would make a good starting point for me to write 8 See "The Novel" in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays (First Midland Book Edition; Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1963),

117. 7 Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi by Maxim Gorky, authorized translation from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (Second edition; Richmond, Hogarth Press, 1920), 38-39.

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LITERATURE

a good peppery foreword against all that significant form piffle. And if you can easily lay hands on a cheap copy of Tolstoi's What is Art? send me that too, with the bill. I must pay for them [Lawrence's italics]" (Q.R., 370). Lawrence must also have read some of the criticism of Tolstoy's work which was published in England during the early part of the twentieth century. Edward Garnett's book Tolstoy: His Life and Writings (London, 1914) would almost certainly have been read by Lawrence as well as Edward Garnett's essay "Tolstoy's Place in European Literature". 8 The evidence for Lawrence's reading of Dostoevsky is much more detailed and enables us to identify more of the specific works themselves. We have already referred to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which Lawrence read as early as 1909. The next book of Dostoevsky's for which we have concrete evidence is The House of the Dead, which was sent to Lawrence by A. W. McLeod in March, 1914. Acknowledging the book, Lawrence writes: "Thanks for the House of the Dead. We have begun reading it, but I don't like it very much. It seems a bit dull: so much statement [Lawrence's italics]" (L., 180).» It is significant, in terms of Lawrence's intellectual development, that his most concentrated period of reading Dostoevsky occurs when Lawrence is struggling to formulate his own "philosophy". By December, 1914, Lawrence is already writing deprecatingly of Dostoevsky's Letters from the Underworld in comparison with the "Book of Job". In a letter to Gordon Campbell, ?I9 December 1914, Lawrence says: "If you want a story of your own soul, it is perfectly done in the book of Job - much better than in Letters from 8 Edward Garnett's essay "Tolstoy's Place in European Literature" was published in Leo Tolstoy by G. K. Chesterton, G. H. Perris, E. Garnett (London, Hodder and Stroughton, 1903), 25-36. In a recent study, "D. H. Lawrence, the Russians, and Giovanni Verga", Armin Arnold claims: "Edward Garnett was the author of books on Tolstoy (1914) and Turgenev (1917), both of which Lawrence read" (Comparative Literature Studies, II, No. 3 [1965], 251). Arnold does not cite his evidence for this assertion. 9 Another reference to The House of the Dead may be found in a letter to Dollie Radford dated 14 March 1916 in which Lawrence says, "Soon you will have read enough horrors, "House of the Dead", and so on." For this letter, see C.B., 1,364.

D. H. L A W R E N C E ' S READING OF R U S S I A N L I T E R A T U R E the

Underworld

(C.L.,

I, 301). 1 0 In a n undated letter to L a d y

Ottoline Morrell, he asks her, " H a v e y o u got a C h a p m a n ' s o r a Brothers Karamazov

21

Homer

to lend m e ? " (L., 237). 1 1 In April, 1915,

L a w r e n c e had probably finished D o s t o e v s k y ' s The Idiot, just prior to beginning his o w n second attempt to write his " p h i l o s o p h y " . In a letter to Koteliansky dated in A p r i l , 1915, he says, " I will send y o u The Idiot to r e a d " , and in the same letter Lawrence adds, " I a m reading the D o s t o e v s k y letters", a reference obviously n o t to Letters from the Underworld, but to a translation o f D o s t o e v s k y ' s letters. E. C . M a y n e , w h o m Lawrence had met in July, 1913 (see C.L., I, 215), published in 1914 the Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Michailovich

to His Family and Friends. Lawrence's reaction to this

b o o k is worth noting: What an amazing person he [Dostoevsky] was - a pure introvert, a purely disintegrating will - there was not a grain of the passion of love within him - all the passion of hate, of evil. Yet a great man. It has become, I think, now, a supreme wickedness to set up a Christ worship as Dostoevsky did: it is the outcome of an evil will, disguising itself in terms of love. But he is a great man and I have the greatest admiration for him. I even feel a sort of subterranean love for him. But he never, never wanted anybody to love him, to come close to him. He exerted repelling influence on everybody (C.L., 1,332). T h a t Lawrence's reading o f The Idiot belongs to the spring o f 1915 is supported by a letter to L a d y Ottoline Morrell, written while Lawrence was living at G r e a t h a m , Pulborough, Sussex, in w h i c h he writes as follows: Dostoevsky's Letters from the Underworld was published in England in the Everyman Library edition in 1913. The book also contained "The Gentle Maiden" and "The Landlady". If D. H. Lawrence used the Everyman edition he very likely read these two works as well. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters from the Underworld, The Gentle Maiden, The Landlady translated with an introduction by C. J. Hogarth (London, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1957). Lawrence was a habitual reader of the Everyman Library. See his letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell dated 24 May 1916 in which he asks her to send him "an Everyman list one day" (C.L., 1,454). 11 In the Preface to Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor, Lawrence states that he first read The Brothers Karamazov in 1913 and discussed it with J. M. Murry. Since the letter from which I quote belongs to 1914, Lawrence is planning to read The Brothers Karamazov for the second time.

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I have been reading Dostoievsky's Idiot. I don't like Dostoievsky. He is again like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and, in order to belong to the light, professing love, all love. But his nose is sharp with hate, his running is shadowy and rat-like, he is a will fixed and gripped like a trap. He is not nice (L., 238). Before the early part of 1916 Lawrence appears to have read the major works of Dostoevsky. In January of that year we find him writing to Lady Ottoline Morrell asking her to bring him "one or two books" and specifying "The Possessed, if you have it" (C.L., I, 416). Later, on the first of February, 1916, Lawrence writes to her again: "I have taken a great dislike to Dostoievsky in The Possessed. It seems so sensational, and such a degrading of the pure mind, somehow. It seems as though the pure mind, the true reason, which surely is noble, were made trampled and filthy under the hoofs of secret, preverse, undirect sensuality" (C.L., 1,420). By the middle of February, Lawrence's earlier enthusiasm for Dostoevsky's greatness has changed to revulsion. "He has lost his spell over me: I was bored rather by The Possessed", he writes to Koteliansky, and adds, " I thought The Idiot far [Lawrence's italics] better than Possessed, also Karamazov" (C.L., 1,429). In 1916, Lawrence also read parts of Koteliansky's translation of Dostoevsky's Pages from the Journal of an Author which Koteliansky had published that year in collaboration with J. M . Murry. Writing to Koteliansky ?i5 December 1916, Lawrence says: "Thank you for the little Dostoevsky book. I have only read Murry's Introduction, and Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Queer Fellow"" (C.L., I, 492).12 Whether Lawrence ever read the short novels of Dostoevsky we have, at the present time, no way of knowing. We may, however, assume that Lawrence did read the three books of Dostoevsky letters and reminiscences which Koteliansky translated during Lawrence's lifetime: Dostoevsky: Letters The "Dostoevsky book" to which Lawrence's letter refers is Pages from the Journal of an Author, Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry (London and Dublin, Maunsel, 1916). This book includes the story "Dream of a Queer Fellow", or "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", as the title is translated in Constance Garnett's Fyodor Dostoevsky, An Honest Thief and Other Stories (London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1957), 382-405. The first edition of Constance Garnett's translation of this work appeared in 1919. 12

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and Reminiscences (1923); Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife: The Diary and Reminiscences of Mme. Dostoevsky (1926); and New Dostoevsky Letters (1929). Finally, we may note that Lawrence at various times returned to re-read Dostoevsky's work, as he tells us in the introduction which he wrote for Koteliansky's translation of The Grand Inquisitor published after Lawrence's death: It is a strange experience, to examine one's reaction to a book over a period of years. I remember when I first read The Brothers Karamazov, in 1913, how fascinated yet unconvinced it left me... Since then I have read The Brothers Karamazov twice, and each time found it more depressing because, alas, more drearily true to life. At first it had been lurid romance. Now I read The Grand Inquisitor once more, and my heart sinks right through my shoes (S.L.C., 233). The third great Russian novelist who "meant an enormous amount" to Lawrence is, as we have already noted, Turgenev. In addition to the reference which occurs in Lawrence's letter to Catherine Carswell, there are among Lawrence's letters at least three other references to Turgenev. The first of these is in a well-known letter to Edward Garnett in which Lawrence says: "The certain moral scheme is what I object to. In Turgenev, and in Tolstoi, and in Dostoievsky, the moral scheme into which all the characters fit and it is nearly the same scheme - is, whatever the extraordinariness of the characters themselves, dull, old, dead" (C.L., I, 281). The second reference is found in a letter written in 1929 in which Lawrence describes Baden-Baden as "incurably 1850, with the romance and the pathos and the bathos of Turgenev rather than Dostoevsky" (C.L., II, 1166-67). The third is a specific reference to Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches found in a letter to Catherine Carswell dated 27 November 1916 in which Lawrence inveighs against the prevailing English adulation of Russian literature as follows: I got Sportsman's Sketches and have read them. No, I don't like Turgenev very much; he seems so very critical, like Katherine Mansfield and also a sort of male old maid. It amazes me that we have bowed down and worshipped these foreigners as we have. Their art is so clumsy, really, and clayey, compared with our own. I read Deerslayer just before the Turgenev. And I can tell you what a come-down it was, from the pure and ex-

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quisite art of Fenimore Cooper - whom we count nobody - to the journalistic bludgeonings of Turgenev. They are all - Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Flaubert - so very obvious [Lawrence's italics] and coarse, beside the lovely, mature and sensitive art of Fenimore Cooper or Hardy. It seems to me that our English art, at its best, is by far the subtlest and loveliest and most perfect in the world (C.Z,., 1,488). Apart from these references to Turgenev, Lawrence's correspondence does not mention any other specific works by the Russian writer that he read. Jessie Chambers in her D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, however, says "He liked Turgenev immensely, and gave me his copy of Fathers and Sons, and impressed upon me that I must read Rudin."13 Whether Lawrence's title Sons and Lovers owes something to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is not known, but Turgenev's works were certainly accessible in English translations. Constance Garnett, for example, whom Lawrence knew, had translated The Novels and Tales of Ivan Turgenev, 17 vols., 1894-1906. There was also an English translation of The Novels and Stories of Ivan Turgenieff by Isabel Hapgood, 13 vols., 1903-1905. Another work of Turgenev's which may well have come to Lawrence's attention is Virgin Soil, translated by R. S. Townsend, 1906 (Everyman's Library). We know from an unpublished letter written by Jessie Chambers to Helen Corke that the former was familiar with Turgenev's Virgin Soil, and it would be fair to assume that Lawrence knew the book as well. In addition, Lawrence might have read two critical works on Turgenev: the first of these, Two Russian Reformers: Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy by J. A . T. Lloyd, 1910; and second, Turgenev (a study) by Edward Garnett, 1917. The absence of confirming evidence, however, prevents further examination of this subject.

SeeA.P.R., 121. Another reference to Turgenev is to be found in the English Review (March, 1919) version of "Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels" (now reprinted in D. H. Lawrence: The Symbolic Meaning, Edited by Armin Arnold (New York, The Viking Press, 1964), where Lawrence writes: "The world - the pristine world of Glimmerglass - is, perhaps, lovelier than any place created in language: lovelier than Hardy or Turgenev, lovelier than the lands in ancient poetry or in Irish verse" (98). 13

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2

We have now sketched Lawrence's reading of the three great Russian novelists: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. Besides these novelists there were, however, other Russian writers who were also popular in England during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and it would be strange indeed if Lawrence were not familiar with their work. I refer to the Russian writers of short fiction, writers such as Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, who excelled in that very genre which Lawrence himself used so effectively in his own volumes of short stories and his longer tales or nouvelle. Despite the numerous studies that have been made of Lawrence's work, the relation between Lawrence's short fiction and that of the Russians has thus far not been explored. Yet it would have been impossible for Lawrence to escape the influence of those stories which were so admired by his contemporaries and which were discussed by them. So far as Chekhov is concerned, a book which certainly must have come into Lawrence's hands is The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Gilbert Cannan (1917). That Lawrence was already familiar with Chekhov's work before the publication of Koteliansky's translation may be gathered from a letter to Edward Garnett dated 1 February 1913 in which Lawrence says: " I believe that, just as an audience was found in Russia for Tchekhov [Lawrence's italics], so an audience might be found in England for some of my stuff, if there were a man to whip 'em in" (L., 103).14 A major portion of Chekhov's fiction was published in Constance Garaett's translation of The Tales of Chekhov, 13 vols., 1916-1922. Lawrence's contact with the Garnetts would undoubtedly have put him in touch with most of Chekhov's work. Besides The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories, Koteliansky was responsible for translating another book of short stories, under the title The Bet and Other Stories (London and Dublin, 1915). In addition, it is likely that Lawrence read the four An even earlier reference to Chekhov's work is recorded in Jessie Chambers's memoir of D. H. Lawrence. SeeA.P.R., 184.

14

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books of Chekhov letters and reminiscences which were also translated by Koteliansky. The first of these books entitled The Notebooks of Anton 7'chekhov, together with Reminiscences of Tchekhov by Maxim Gorky was received by Lawrence on 27 May 1921 and acknowledged as follows: Your letter and Tchekhov"s Note Book arrived today. They are charming [Lawrence's italics] little books, in format and appearance, these. I have read only a bit, walking up here to Ebersteinburg through the woods. It makes me want to sneeze, like pepper in the nose. - But very many thanks for the book (C.L., II, 654). The three other books which Koteliansky translated and very likely sent Lawrence are Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov by Maxim Gorky, Alexander Kuprin, and I. A. Bunin (1921); The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov (1925); and Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences (1927). A s early as 1912 the dramas of Chekhov were considered by D . H. Lawrence as a new thing. In a letter to P. F. T. Smith, the headmaster at Davidson Road School, Lawrence writes: "It was awfully nice of you and the other chaps and Miss Mason to get me those two books. The plays are exceedingly interesting. I hope you read them. Tchekhov is a new thing in drama" (C.L., I, 108). We have no way of knowing for certain to which two books Lawrence refers, but I assume that they are translations of two of Chekhov's plays, although most of the plays by Chekhov were not available to readers in England until the plays were translated by Constance Garnett in two volumes (1923). However favorable Lawrence's first impressions of Chekhov's work were in the beginning, Lawrence later considered the Russian " a second-rate writer" (C.L., II, 1109). That Lawrence was familiar with Chekhov's short stories is confirmed by a statement in a posthumously published essay on Giovanni Verga's Mastro-don Gesualdo in which Lawrence says: Verga is one of the greatest masters of the short story. In the volume Novelle Rusticane and in the volume entitled Cavelleria Rusticana are some of the best short stories ever written. They are sometimes as short and as poignant as Tchekhov. I prefer them to Tchekhov. Yet nobody reads them. They are "too depressing." They don't depress me half as

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much as Tchekhov does. I don't understand the popular taste (S.L.C., 271). D. H. Lawrence's extensive reading of another Russian master of the short story might have remained undetected were it not for a single reference in a letter to Edward Garnett dated 3 March 1913. By this time, Lawrence appears to have read a large number of the works of Maxim Gorky, for in the letter we note the following remark: "I've read all the 472 [pence?] Maxim Gorkys, I believe. - 1 love short stories" (C.L., I, 192).15 In addition to this reference to Gorky, Lawrence also cites Gorky in a review of V. V. Rozanov's Fallen Leaves.16 As we have already seen, Lawrence definitely read Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi by Maxim Gorky, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (1920). In the following year some more of Gorky's work may have come to Lawrence's attention when Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov by Maxim Gorky, Alexander Kuprin, and I. A. Bunin was published in a translation by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (1921). Among the novels of Gorky which were available to Lawrence in English translations at the turn of the twentieth century were Foma Gordyeef (1901), Three Men: A Novel (1902), The Individualist (1903), Comrades (1907), and The Spy (1908). It is probable that Lawrence read some of these, perhaps all, but we have no external evidence to establish the probability. The third Russian short story writer whom Lawrence read, and one whose work he also translated is Ivan Bunin. Lawrence seems to have been unacquainted with Bunin's work until June, 1921, at which time we find him writing to S. S. Koteliansky as follows: Yesterday "The Gent, from S. Francisco" and the pen: very many I have not yet been able to trace the titles of all the four and one-half pence Maxim Gorkys that were published in England by 1913, but the amount of Gorky's work available in English translation was already substantial by 1913. For a bibliography of English translations of Gorky, see Amrei Ettlinger and Joan M. Gladstone, Russian Literature, Theatre and Art: A Bibliography of Works in English, published 1900-1945 (London, Hutchinson and Co., 1945), 49-53. Jessie Chambers also confirms Lawrence's reading of Gorky. She says, "He read Maxim Gorky, but didn't care much for him." See A.P.R., 121. 18 S.L.C., 250. 16

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thanks. Have read "The Gent." - and in spite of its lugubriousness, grin with joy. Was Bunin one of the Gorky-Capri crowd? - or only a visitor? But it is screamingly good of Naples and Capri: so comically like the reality: only just a trifle too earnest about it. I will soon get it written over: don't think your text needs much altering (C.L., II, 656). Besides "The Gentleman from San Francisco", we know that Lawrence read the other stories of Bunin published by Koteliansky in the collection "The Gentleman from San Francisco" and Other Stories (1922). In a letter to Koteliansky dated 9 July 1922, Lawrence acknowledges having received this collection of stories as follows: "What a pretty cover Bunin has! But the tales are not very good: Gentleman is much the best" (C.L., II, 712). It is possible also that Lawrence read two more collections of Bunin's short stories which were published in 1923; these were The Dream of Chang and The Elaghin Affair, both translated by B. Guerney. In the same year there also appeared an English version of Bunin's novel The Village translated by I. Hapgood. Except for a 1926 edition of Mityds Love, a re-translation from a French version, the rest of Bunin's works did not appear in English during Lawrence's lifetime. Lawrence's reading of Russian literature did not stop with the three great novelists and the three writers of short stories whom we have discussed so far. In his letters and essays he also refers to the work of Andreyev, Artzybashev, and Gogol. How extensive his reading of these Russians was is difficult to establish. Of Andreyev, Lawrence says only, "Something in Andreyev makes him rather uninteresting to me" (C.L., I, 94).17 Artzybashev (Lawrence spells it Artzibasheff and Artzybashev) is mentioned in a letter to Gordon Campbell written on ?I9 December 1914 (C.L., I, 300-304) and in the review of V. V. Rozanov's Fallen Leaves, where Lawrence writes, "Rozanov is the last of the Russians, after Tchekhov. It is 17 M. Magnus, whom Lawrence knew and to whose Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (New York, Alfred A . Knopf, 1925) Lawrence wrote an extended "Introduction", translated the following plays by Leonid Nicolaevich Andreev (1871-1919): And It Came to Pass That the King Was Dead (London, Daniel, 1921); His Excellency the Governor (London, Daniel, 1921); To the Stars: A Drama (London, Plays for a People's Theatre, Number 10,1921).

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the true Russian voice, become very plaintive now. Artzybashev, Gorky, Merejkovski are his contemporaries, but they are all three a little bit off the tradition. But Rozanov is right on it" (S.L.C., 250). Three of Artzybashev's novels were available to English readers, and Lawrence might, therefore, have read Artzybashev's Sanine translated by Percy Pinkerton with a preface by Gilbert Cannan (New York, 1914); and The Millionaire translated by Percy Pinkerton (New York, 1916). The only reference to Gogol appears in Lawrence's Preface to Max Havelaar by E. D. Dekker (Multatuli, pseud.) where Lawrence states, "The great dynamic force in Multatuli is as it was, really, in Jean Paul and in Swift and Gogol and in Mark Twain, hate, a passionate, honourable hate" (S.L.C., 269-70). Gogol's work was among the earliest Russian novels to appear in English; Dead Souls was first translated in 1854, and Taras Bulba in 1887. Constance Garnett was herself responsible for other translations of Gogol which appeared during Lawrence's lifetime. Yet another Russian writer who came to Lawrence's attention is Alexander Kuprin. Kuprin's tales appeared in The River of Life translated by S. S. Koteliansky and J. M. Murry (1916), and there were later translations of Kuprin's works as follows: The Duel, a novel, translated by B. Guerney (London, 1916); and The Bracelet of Garnets, a book of short stories, translated by L. Pasvolsky (New York, 1917). There is evidence to corroborate Lawrence's reading of Kuprin, and it is clear that Lawrence read at least The River of Life translated by Koteliansky and Murry, since in 1916 these men were in close association with each other. A letter by Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield dated ?II March 1916 contains the following postscript: " K o t [Koteliansky] gave me a Kuprin. It reads awfully well. But I don't [Lawrence's italics] think much of these lesser Russians" (C.L., I, 443). That the book Koteliansky gave to Lawrence was The River of Life is confirmed by the rest of the postscript which says, "Ribnikov is by far the best; but the Japanese [Lawrence's italics] is not created - he is an object, not a subject." The second story in The River of Life, as translated by Koteliansky, is "Captain Ribnikov", which recounts the adventures of a Japanese spy in Petersburg. If Lawrence were interested in Kuprin's works,

3°

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h e m a y also h a v e read t h e n o v e l Yama (The Pit) w h i c h w a s translate d f r o m R u s s i a n b y B. G . G u e r n e y in 1922. 1 8

3 B e f o r e b r i n g i n g this chapter t o a close, I w a n t t o discuss L a w r e n c e ' s r e a d i n g o f f o u r R u s s i a n writers w h o m I will, f o r the m o m e n t , l o o s e l y style as " t h e R u s s i a n thinkers a n d p h i l o s o p h e r s " . T h e s e writers

are

Dimitry

Merezhkovsky,

Vladimir

Solovyov,

Leo

S h e s t o v , a n d V . V . R o z a n o v . T h e first o f these, M e r e z h k o v s k y (1866-1941): turned from poems and manifestoes to tendentious novels and philosophical treatises. In the historical trilogy which gained him a universal reputation (Julian the Apostate, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter and Alexis, 1893-1902), he presented the clash between paganism and Christianity as that of flesh and spirit and hinted at their future merging in the religion of the Holy Trinity. A dialectician, attracted b y mystical sophistication and a believer in the kingdom of the Holy Ghost, Merezhkovsky went through different stages in cultivating the religious interest of the intellectuals. 19 T h a t L a w r e n c e w a s a w a r e o f M e r e z h k o v s k y is s u p p o r t e d b y the reference t o M e r z e h k o v s k y in L a w r e n c e ' s review Fallen Leaves.20

of

Rozanov's

A p a r t f r o m this reference, h o w e v e r , neither L a w -

rence's v o l u m i n o u s correspondence n o r his n u m e r o u s essays m e n t i o n the n a m e o r the w o r k s o f M e r e z h k o v s k y . 2 1 Y e t M e r e z h k o v s k y Lawrence mentions Kuprin again in a letter dated 8 October 1927, "Then if you want to do Nonesuch Press stuff, you must leave out Kuprin and me" (C.L., II, 1007). 19 Marc Slonim, An Outline of Russian Literature (New York, The New American Library, 1959), 132. 20 S.L.C., 250. Lawrence also mentions Merezhkovsky's wife, Zinaida Nikolaevna Hippius, whose play The Green Ring was translated by S. S. Koteliansky and published in 1920. For Lawrence's reference to The Green Ring, see C.L., I, 59921 In The Life of John Middleton Murry (London, Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1959). F. A. Lea states that Murry and Katherine Mansfield "mixed with the Russian colony [in Paris], which included Dmitri Merezhkovsky and Ivan Bunin" (89). This association probably took place in 1922, but I have found no evidence that Lawrence discussed Merezhkovsky's ideas with Murry. The impact which Merezhkovsky's trilogy had on English readers, however, is described by Compton Mackenzie in his book Literature in My Time (New 18

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is exactly the kind of writer who would have interested Lawrence. The trilogy, to which we have referred, consists of three books in the genre of the historical novel; and they were all available to Lawrence in English translations. Merezhkovsky is concerned with the history of Christianity, a subject which is important in Lawrence's work, and the trilogy sketches this history from the time of Julian to Peter the Great. The first book of the trilogy bore the subtitle The Death of the Gods and appeared in England as early as 1901; the second, which has for its central character Leonardo da Vinci, was subtitled The Resurrection of the Gods (sometimes translated as The Gods Resurgent)-, the third book's subtitle was The AntiChrist. In addition to these works, Merezhkovsky's books December the Fourteenth (1925), The Birth of the Gods (1926), and Akhnaton, King of Egypt (1927) were also available in English translations. Without supporting evidence it is difficult to establish a link between Merezhkovsky and D . H. Lawrence, but the interest which the two writers have in the Holy Ghost and in the dualistic development of Christianity as manifested in the Church of the Father and the Church of the Son can hardly be ignored. Although Lawrence's correspondence tells us much about his reading, there is much that it does not reveal. Lawrence's reading of Madame Blavatsky, as William Y o r k Tindall demonstrated some years ago, is a good case in point. 22 Lawrence's numerous allusions to the religion of Egypt may have their origin in Merezhkovsky, and the Lawrencean ideas concerning the consummation in the spirit and consummation in York, Loring and Mussey, 1933). Mackenzie says: " A Russian work which made a deep impression at this time [he refers to 1901-1905] was Merejkowski's trilogy Christ and Anti-Christ, the first two volumes of which were The Death of the Gods and The Forerunner. By the time the translation of Peter and Alexis, the final volume, appeared in 1905 that impression had almost completely vanished and the whole influence of Russian literature upon English intellectuals was concentrated on Dostoievsky and Chekhov" (151-52). 22 See William York Tindall, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New Y o r k , Columbia University Press, 1939). Tindall also notes Lawrence's acquaintance with Russian literature. "He knew Richard Aldington and H. D . , Edward Garnett and Middleton Murry", writes Tindall, "both of whom were authorities on Dostoievsky - and Koteliansky, who knew Virginia Woolf as well as the Russians" (58). Tindall draws attention to the fact that Lawrence "read Dostoievsky at the height of the vogue" (58).

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the flesh, as related to the development of Christianity, have much in common with the ideas expressed in Merezhkovsky's trilogy on the history of the Christian church. The evidence for Lawrence's reading of Vladimir Solovyov is more conclusive. As is the case with so many of the Russian writers whom Lawrence read, Solovyov was also drawn to Lawrence's attention by his friend S. S. Koteliansky. In a letter dated 19 May 1915, Lawrence says, "Thank you very much for Soloviev. He is interesting, very - but he never says anything he wants to say. He makes a rare mess, fiddling about with orthodox Christianity. Dostoevsky made the same mess" (C.L., I, 344). Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) was the main source of a religious revival in Russia and "left a profound imprint on many fields of Russian life and thought". A brief summary of Solovyov's ideas is given by Marc Slonim: Solovyov considered man as a link between Nature and God, and the goal of history the marriage of humanity to divinity, which would overcome the duality of the spiritual and the natural. He believed not only in the individual but also in the collective striving for the Supreme Good, and his mystical philosophy contained the concept of "sobornost," or "Congregationalism" or "conciliarity." While affirming his faith in the final victory of Light, Solovyov wanted to blend the practical and the ideal and wrote extensively on various political problems.23 Not all of Solovyov's work was available to Lawrence in English translations even though Solovyov's complete works were published in Moscow in 1911 in ten volumes. Those works which had been translated into English by 1930 appeared first in 1915, and the book by Solovyov which Koteliansky must have sent to Lawrence in that year was almost certainly Solovyov's book bearing the remarkable title, War, Progress and the End of History: Including a Short History of the Antichrist, translated from the Russian by Alexander Bakshy, with a biographical notice by Dr. Hagberg Wright (London, 1915). I say almost certainly because during the same year another translation of Solovyov had been published entitled War and Christianity from the Russian Point of View: Three Conversations, 23

Marc Slonim, An Outline of Russian Literature, 133.

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with an introduction by Stephen Graham (London, 1915). These two books, as it turns out, are translations of the same work by Solovyov. 24 The only other book by Solovyov in English translation to which Lawrence would have had access was The Justification of the Good: An Essay in Moral Philosophy translated by Natalie A. Duddington (London, 1918). Lawrence's reaction to his reading of Solovyov is given in the letter to Koteliansky to which we have referred above. "I am typing my philosophy myself", he tells his correspondent. "When I read it in comparison with Soloviev, I am proud of my cleverness" (C.L., I, 345). A comparison of Lawrence's thought with that of Solovyov would certainly reveal some marked contrasts; but such influence as Solovyov's book might have had on Lawrence is likely to have taken the form of a reaction rather than that of a borrowing or adaptation of ideas. Since the one book by Solovyov specifically referred to by no means embodies all of the Russian philosopher's views, it seems unlikely that an attempt at a comprehensive comparison between Lawrence and Solovyov would prove very rewarding. Another of "the Russian thinkers" with whose work Lawrence was familiar is Leo Shestov. 25 We do not know when Lawrence first read Shestov, but on 29 August 1919, Lawrence refers to having done some work for Koteliansky on the "Russian Spirit", 24 See Appendix III called "Solovyov's Works Available in English Translation" in A Solovyov Anthology arranged by S. L. Frank, translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddington (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), 256. See also the note in Nicolas Zernov, Three Russian Prophets: Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev (London, S.C.M. Press, 1944), 149. Lawrence also read another book by another Russian, the title of which in comprehensiveness rivals that employed by Solovyov: P. D . Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought: A Key to the Enigmas of the World translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragadon (New York, Alfred A . Knopf, 1920). For Lawrence's reaction to this book, see E. W. Tedlock, Jr., " D . H. Lawrence's Annotations of Ouspensky's Tertium Organum", II, TSLL (i960), 206-18. 25 There is some confusion about the identity of Leo Shestov. Slonim in Modern Russian Literature (Oxford University Press, 1953, 116) states that Leo Shestov was the pen name of Leo Schwartzman (1866-1938), but the British Museum Catalogue gives Leo Shestov as the pseudonym of Lev [i.e. Leo] Isaakovich. The pseudonym was that of Lev Isaakovich Schwartzman.

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obviously by Shestov. The letter asks Koteliansky for "everything you know about Shestov" (C.L., I, 592) in order that Lawrence may have the information he needs to write an introduction to All Things Are Possible, translated by Koteliansky and published with Lawrence's Foreword in 1920. The degree of Lawrence's involvement in this translation of Shestov will be examined in the next chapter; however, we should note here that Lawrence was apparently acquainted with other works by Shestov besides All Things Are Possible. A s early as 1916, Koteliansky and Murry collaborated in a translation of Shestov's Anton Chekhov and Other Essays (London, 1916), which also contains several pieces of Shestov's philosophy. There is some evidence that Koteliansky also sent Lawrence other works in manuscript which were never published. 28 The Russian thinker who made the greatest impression on D . H. Lawrence is V. V. Rozanov (1856-1919). Lawrence himself says: He is the first Russian, as far as I am concerned, who has ever said anything to me. And his vision is full of passion, vivid, valid. He is the first to see that immortality is in the vividness of life, not in the loss of life. The butterfly becomes a whole revelation to him: and to us. When Rozanov is wholly awake, and a new man, a risen man, the living and resurrected pagan, then he is a great man and a great seer, and perhaps, as he says himself, the first Russian to emerge (S.L.C., 248). Such unequivocal admiration for Rozanov requires that Lawrence's reading of this Russian be thoroughly explored. In Chapter V, I will attempt such an exploration, particularly in relation to Lawrence's ideas in the later period of his life, the period in which he wrote The Man Who Died and Lady Chatterley's Lover. In this discussion of Lawrence's reading, we need mention only that Lawrence had read closely two books by Rozanov which Koteliansky was responsible for translating into English: these are Solitaria (London, 1927); and Fallen Leaves (London, 1929). Lawrence's reading may not, however, have been confined to these two works. In his review of Fallen Leaves, Lawrence says, "Rozanov is now acquiring something of a European reputation. There is a translation in French, 28 See Lawrence's letter to Koteliansky dated 28 June 1926: "Don't send me any more of that miserable Shestov fragment" (C.L., II, 923).

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and one promised in German, and the advanced young writers in Paris and Berlin talk of him as one of the true lights" (S.L.C., 249-50). In a letter to Max Mohr, dated 22 March 1928 (C.L., II, 104748), Lawrence refers to their discussion of Rozanov. It is likely that Mohr, whom Lawrence met in 1927, was familiar with the forthcoming German translation of Rozanov's work and discussed this with Lawrence. The French translation, entitled L'Apocalypse de notre temps précédé de Esseulment (Paris, 1930) made by Boris de Schloezer and Vladimir Pozner, may be the one Lawrence had in mind in his review of Fallen Leaves. Since the review was published in Everyman (23 January 1930), however, it seems likely that he was referring to some other French translation of Rozanov's work. V. V. Rozanov (1856-1919) was one of those Russian intellectuals who was closely associated with both Merezhkovsky and Solovyov. As Lawrence himself points out, Rozanov was in some ways a disciple of Dostoevsky, and we are told by Marc Slonim that Rozanov "was active in those Russian religious and philosophical societies which gained large audiences at the beginning of the century". 27 The relation between Lawrence's ideas and those of Rozanov have already attracted scholarly attention; when we come to our chapter on Lawrence and Rozanov, we will look closely at such studies as Janko Lavrin's "Sex and Eros (on Rozanov, Weininger, and D. H. Lawrence)"; Heinrich Stammler's "Apocalyptic Speculations in the Works of D. H. Lawrence and V. V. Rozanov" ; and Renato Poggioli's "On the Works and Thoughts of Vasili Rozanov". 28

Marc Slonim, An Outline of Russian Literature, 132. These studies were published as follows : Janko Lavrin, "Sex and Eros (on Rozanov, Weininger, and D. H. Lawrence)" in Aspects of Modernism, from Wilde to Pirandello (London, Stanley Nott, 1935), 141-59; Renato Poggioli, "On the Works and Thoughts of Vasili Rozanov" in The Phoenix and the Spider (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1957), 158-207; Heinrich Stammler, "Apocalyptic Speculations in the Works of D. H. Lawrence and V. V. Rozanov", Die Welt Du Slaven, IV (1959), 67-73. 27

28

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4 Despite tht regular appearance in England of Russian literature in translation as early as the 1850's, the part that Russian writers have played in the shaping of English literature has not been thoroughly studied.29 Yet, as one writer has phrased it, "The importance of the Russian novel in English literary history can hardly be overemphasized" ; and this same writer goes on to support his statement as follows: Henry James referred to Turgenev as " l e premier romancier de son t e m p s ; " George Moore, who admired Tolstoy's "solidity of specification," referred to Anna Karenina as the world's greatest novel; Robert Louis Stevenson interpreted Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a room, " a house of life," into which a reader could enter, and be "tortured and purified;" Galsworthy sought "spiritual truth" in the writings of Turgenev and Tolstoy; and Arnold Bennett compiled a list o f the twelve greatest novels in the world, a list on which every item came f r o m the pen of a Russian author. 3 0

The impact which Russian literature had on those English writers who emerged as major figures after 1900, those who were in fact Lawrence's contemporaries, would be a worthy subject for literary research. When, in one of his letters to Catherine Carswell, Lawrence says, "It amazes me that we have bowed down and worshipped these foreigners [i.e. Russians] as we have" (C.L., I, 488), it is no idle observation on his part, but an accurate assessment of what was happening in literary circles at the time. Among the 29 Only two books deal with this subject. See Dorothy Brewster, East-West Passage: A Study in Literary Relationships (London, 1954) and Gilbert Phelps, The Russian Novel in English Fiction (London, 1956). In addition, a number of previously published essays on the subject of Russian and English fiction, including some of Lawrence's own comments, have been collected under the title Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction, Edited with an Introduction by Donald Davie (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1965). 30 Harold Orel, "Victorians and the Russian Novel: A Bibliography", Bulletin of Bibliography (January-April, 1954), 61. Useful as Orel's bibliography is, it omits one important item which lists a large number of English translations of Russian works. See Amrei Ettlinger and Joan M. Gladstone, Russian Literature, Theatre and Art: A Bibliography of Works in English Published 1900-1945 (London, 1945).

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writers with whom Lawrence was closely associated, there were few who did not bow down and worship the achievement of the Russians. John Middleton Murry, perhaps, led the worshippers, and his idolatry may account for some of Lawrence's exasperation with the prevalent English attitude towards the Russians; but there were also such writers as Virginia Woolf, who felt that, after the Russians had spoken, there was nothing left for English writers to say. D. H. Lawrence, however, could not accept such a view; he had his own ideas as to the direction which English fiction ought to take, and he was not willing to allow the Russians (or any one else) to prevent him from developing his own artistic genius. The salutary consequences of Lawrence's self-confidence for the development of twentieth-century fiction can easily be appreciated in retrospect. That Lawrence refused to acknowledge the Russian writers as the greatest writers of all time does not, of course, mean that he was not influenced by them or that he learned nothing from them. The number of books by the Russians that Lawrence read is enough in itself to prove that he was genuinely attracted to their work and that his involvement with Russian literature was certainly not casual. A study of Lawrence's criticism of Russian literature, therefore, can serve as an index of his own critical ideas and of his own development as an artist. Because his reading was so vast, I cannot deal with every facet of Lawrence's reaction to the Russians but must confine my attention to those writers who appealed to him most and about whom he expressed himself at some length. These writers, in my opinion, are Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Rozanov; and tempting as it may be to speculate, for example, on the relation between Lawrence's short stories and those of Chekhov and Gorky, or on the possible derivations of Lawrencean philosophical and religious ideas from the works of Merezhkovsky, Shestov, or Solovyov, we must confine our attention to those Russian writers about whom Lawrence has left a tangible record of his reactions. Before proceeding to this subject, however, I will go on to examine Lawrence's role as a translator of Russian literature.

II D. H. L A W R E N C E ' S ROLE A S A T R A N S L A T O R OF RUSSIAN L I T E R A T U R E

In A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (London, 1963) Warren Roberts provides the basis for speculating that D. H. Lawrence may have been involved in more translations of Russian works than are now ascribed to him.1 Although Roberts does not say so, his information obviously comes from The Intelligent Heart (London, 1954), Harry T. Moore's biography of Lawrence. The basis for Moore's assumption is a letter, dated 28 April 1952, from Mr. Bertram Rota who states : Koteliansky says that the reason Lawrence's name does not appear as a collaborator in the translation of this book [Shestov's All Things Are Possible'], or of Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor or other translations which they did together [emphasis mine], is that Lawrence felt that it would be damaging to his reputation with publishers [as a creative writer] if he should appear as a translator. 2

Since S. S. Koteliansky was responsible for a substantial number of translations of Russian works into English, D. H. Lawrence's role as a translator of Russian literature may well be more extensive than that which students of Lawrence now recognize.3 The main purpose of this chapter is to examine the part which Lawrence played in the Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (Soho Bibliographies; London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), 41-42. 2 Harry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (New York, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954), 290. 3 See George J. Zytaruk, "S. S. Koteliansky's Translations of Russian Works into English", The Bulletin of Bibliography and Magazine Notes, XXV, No. 3 (May-August, 1967), 65-66. This bibliography, with some revisions, is now published as "Appendix I" in Q.R., 407-10. 1

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translation of Russian writers and to test the possibility that his collaboration with Koteliansky extends to other works not hitherto acknowledged. 1 I want to make it clear at the outset that Lawrence's role as a translator of Russian is not at all comparable to his role as a translator of Italian. Lawrence knew the Italian language; he did not know Russian. His mastery of Italian was by no means complete, a factor which is responsible for certain flaws in his translations of Giovanni Verga. Giovanni Cecchetti, who has made a study of Lawrence's translations of Verga, says: A translator must have a complete mastery of the linguistic world o f his author; this is an elementary requirement. One of Lawrence's main shortcomings was his inadequate knowledge of Italian; and, unfortunately for his translations, Verga's texts present more difficulties than those of most other Italian writers. Lawrence learned Italian through direct contacts with the Italian people, without ever studying it systematically. When he began to work on his translations he had been in Italy a relatively short time, and almost entirely in regions where a large variety of dialects are spoken. Even many years later, after a long period of residence in Tuscany - the only part of the country where the language is spoken correctly by nearly everyone - he wrote some letters in Italian which betray a rather vague notion of the language he is using; he is actually thinking and writing in English, and his grammar, vocabulary, and spelling are poor. 4

The problems which Lawrence's "inadequate knowledge of Italian" produced are well documented in the study from which I have quoted, and the faults or virtues of Lawrence's translations of Verga are not of immediate concern here. What is important is that before Lawrence could legitimately be called a translator of Russian, it would be necessary to prove that he possessed at least an adequate knowledge of Russian. Interestingly enough, Lawrence once began to study the Russian language and asked Koteliansky: "If you will send me a grammar book, I'll begin to learn Russian. Giovanni Cecchetti, "Verga and D. H. Lawrence's Translations", Comparative Literature, IX (Fall, 1957), 338. 4

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Just an ordinary grammar book. Even if I never do go to Russia, it'll do me no harm" (C.L., II, 876). Koteliansky responded enthusiastically by sending him four grammar books, which Lawrence received and acknowledged in a letter dated 15 January 1926 as follows: " I have the F O U R grammar books, & I feel like the man who asked for a piece of bread, & was given a field of corn" ( Q . R . , 280). Apparently he "bravely started" on the Russian alphabet, and Frieda recalls that "he learnt quite a lot and sat in the evening making Russian noises". 5 In the end, the journey to Russia was abandoned and so was the attempt to learn the language. All of Lawrence's work on translations of Russian literature into English was, however, done prior to his attempt to learn Russian; his role as a translator, therefore, is only that of a collaborator with S. S. Koteliansky, who was a native of Russia and whose command of the Russian language is indisputable. D . H. Lawrence's relations with S. S. Koteliansky have not been studied in such detail as have Lawrence's relations with, for example, J. M. Murry, Catherine Carswell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, or the Hon. Dorothy Brett. Probably the reason for this lack of attention stems from Koteliansky's failure to write a memoir in the years immediately following Lawrence's death. If anyone were in a position to write about his relations with Lawrence, S. S. Koteliansky was certainly the man. And because of Lawrence's collaboration with Koteliansky in translations of Russian works into English, it is important for us to know more of this Russian whom Lawrence befriended. Who was Koteliansky? Perhaps something of the formidable nature of this man is conveyed by the name itself: Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky, a name unpronounceable for most Englishmen and which was therefore soon shortened by all his friends to " K o t " . The Hon. Dorothy Brett, who was an artist, has left the following lively description of Koteliansky: ...so broad-shouldered that he [looked] short, his black hair brushed straight up "en brosse", his dark eyes set perhaps a trifle too close to his 6 Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence, edited by E. W. Tedlock, Jr. (New York, Alfred A . Knopf, 1964), 225.

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nose, the nose a delicate well-made arch, gold eye-glasses pinched onto it. He [had] an air of distinction, of power, and also a tremendous capacity for fun and enjoyment.6 Leonard Woolf, who knew the man and worked with him, likens him to the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Job. "If Jeremiah had been born in a ghetto village of the Ukraine", says Woolf, "he would have been Kot." "When he shook hands with you", Woolf recalls, "you felt that all the smaller bones in your hand must certainly have been permanently crushed to fine powder. The handshake was merely an unconscious part of Kot's passionate intensity and integrity." 7 If there is any way to account for Lawrence's extraordinary friendship with Koteliansky it probably lies in the "passionate intensity and integrity" of Koteliansky, those qualities which Lawrence admired most in people. Leonard Woolf has, I think, focused accurately on the basis of the Lawrence-Koteliansky friendship: "Kot's passionate approval of what he thought good, particularly in people; his intense hatred of what he thought bad; the directness and vehemence of his speech; his inability to tell a lie - all this appealed strongly to Lawrence." 8 Koteliansky was born in the little village of Ostropol in Volhinia Province in the Ukraine. The year is given by K . W. Gransden as 1880; Leonard Woolf gives it as 1882. The documents which I have examined, however, among them Koteliansky's Russian passport, give the year as 1880; and the date of birth as April 1st. Kot's father was Arzum Shloima Koteliansky; his mother was Beila Geller. 9 Kot was very proud of his mother's side of the family, and he would sometimes cite her famous ancestors as indicative of the stock from which he had descended. Koteliansky's parents were well off; the family owned a flourmill and the mother also ran a prosperous retail business. Besides Quoted from C.B., 1,341. See Leonard Woolf's memoir " K o t " in The New Statesman and Nation, X L I X (5 February 1955), 170-72. 8 Leonard Woolf, " K o t " , 172. • S. S. Koteliansky's "Certificate of Naturalization", however, records the parents' names as Solomon and Beila Koteliansky. 4

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Koteliansky, there were two brothers and one sister in the family. With help from Koteliansky, one of the brothers escaped to Canada and made his home in Montreal. Despite his adoption of England as his second homeland, Koteliansky kept in close touch with the members of his family, both in the Ukraine and in Canada. Much could be written about Kot's life in London and of his deep affection for England, and especially about his relations with such prominent literaryfiguresas Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield (for whom Kot had the highest regard), J. M. Murry, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, G. B. Shaw, James Stephens, Ralph Hodgson, and Dorothy M. Richardson. Kot's letters from all these people are preserved among The Koteliansky Papers in the British Museum.10 In addition there are letters from J. W. N. Sullivan, Mark Gertler, Gilbert Cannan, and Philip Heseltine. Koteliansky continued to be associated with Lady Ottoline Morrell after Lawrence's death, and there are some interesting letters from her to Kot as well. Among his dearest friends were Beatrice Lady Glenavy (formerly Beatrice Campbell) and Marjorie Wells. Perhaps the most surprising of Kot's correspondents is Jessie Chambers. When in 1936, she published her memoir of Lawrence, Kot apparently wrote to her and told her how much he appreciated her book; later he tried to influence her to write a more definitive account of her relationship with Lawrence. Although Kot's own story is well worth telling, let me now turn to his arrival in England and the beginning of his friendship with Lawrence. It is not clear why or under what circumstances Kot came to England. Gransden mentions " a three months' university grant", 11 but Mrs. Esther Salaman, who was Kot's intimate friend, denies that there was any such sponsorship. According to Mrs. Salaman, Kot was sent to England by his mother; and it was his mother who supported him during his first few months in England. Koteliansky's Russian passport was issued in Kiev on 17 May 10

For a description of The Koteliansky Papers, see K . W. Gransden, "The S. S. Koteliansky Bequest", The British Museum Quarterly, X X (1956), 83-84. Also see my "Introduction" to Q.R. 11 K. W. Gransden, "Rananim: D. H. Lawrence's Letters to S. S. Koteliansky", Twentieth Century, CLIX (January 1956), 22.

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1911, and he appears to have left Russia on 23 June 1911. He arrived in England on 7 July 1911, but where he stayed or what he did at that time I have not been able to discover. In 1914, when Lawrence first met Koteliansky, the latter was employed at the Russian Law Bureau at 212 High Holborn, London, E.C. The Law Bureau was only a rather pretentious name for a law office run by a Russian named R. S. Slatkowsky. In 1914 the Bureau included Koteliansky and another man named Home. What sort of business was handled by the Law Bureau has not been recorded by anyone who was directly connected with it; however, Witter Bynner recalls: When I asked Frieda twenty-nine years later about Koteliansky, she beamed back at me: "He did not like me, but he loved Lawrence and he used to cheer Lawrence by roaring Russian songs at him. He was a mystery because he was supposed to be in a law office but he would take us there and bounce his boss out of the place and mix up sour herring and mashed potatoes for us on the spot with any old plates and then sing for us. Yes, he loved Lawrence. Ja!" 12 Mark Gertler, one of Kot's closest friends, is reported to have facetiously remarked that Kot's job at the Bureau was "to black his boss's beard". Slatkowsky was apparently a Russian lawyer, and Home had some training as an English barrister; Koteliansky, who could read and write both Russian and English must have worked as a kind of secretary and translator in the whole business. Beatrice Lady Glenavy has left this record of her visit to the Law Bureau: "I once went there with Katherine [Mansfield] and [John Middleton] Murry and was delighted with the hideousness of it all: the darkness, the horsehair-covered furniture, a picture of kittens playing in a basket of pansies, and an even more incongruous picture for such a place, a Christ surrounded by little children." 13 Koteliansky met Lawrence in the summer of 1914, when the two men went on a walking tour in the Lake District. There were four men on that historic occasion: Home, whom we have already Witter Bynner, Journey With Genius (London, Peter Nevill, 1953), 201. Beatrice Lady Glenavy, " Today We Will Only Gossip" (London, Constable, 1964), 191-92.

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mentioned; Lewis, a Vickers engineer, whom Lawrence had met in Italy in 1914 and whose parents lived in Westmorland; S. S. Koteliansky; and D. H. Lawrence. This was a memorable occasion for Lawrence, and for Koteliansky, for it marked the beginning of their relationship, and it is the story of this relationship that is told in the letters which Koteliansky willed to the British Museum when he died on 15 January 1955. I have described elsewhere the nature and the significance of Lawrence's letters to Koteliansky, and I need only emphasize here that the letters enable us to follow rather closely the part which Lawrence played in Koteliansky's activities as a translator. The first translation published by Koteliansky was A . P. Chekhov's The Bet and Other Stories (London and Dublin, Maunsel and Co., 1915), which was translated by S. S. Koteliansky and J. M . Murry; next came Leon [Leo] Shestov's Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays, in which Murry also assisted and which was published by the same publisher in 1916. In 1917 Koteliansky published some more of Chekhov's stories under the title The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Gilbert Cannan (New Y o r k , Charles Scribner's Sons). A m o n g Koteliansky's other collaborators, in addition to D . H. Lawrence, were Virginia and Leonard Woolf as well as Katherine Mansfield and Philip Tomlinson. Leonard Woolf, who was Koteliansky's collaborator in several works, describes the way the two men worked together as follows: His [Koteliansky's] method was to write out the translation in his own strange English and leave a large space between the lines in which I then turned his English into my English. His English was indeed strange, but also so vivid and individual that I was often tempted to leave it untouched. For instance, he wrote: "She came into the room carrying in her arms a peeled-off little dog," and on another occasion: "She wore a haggish look." You only learned to the full Kot's intensity and integrity by collaborating with him in a Russian translation. I taught myself a smattering of Russian in order to be able to understand something of what he was doing. After I had turned his draft into English English, we then went through it sentence by sentence. Kot had a most sensitive understanding of and feeling for language and literature and also a strong and subtle mind. He would pass no sentence until he was absol-

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utely convinced that it gave the exact shade of meaning and feeling of the original and we would sometimes be a quarter of an hour arguing over a single word.14 It was in fact Koteliansky who was to a considerable degree responsible for the Hogarth Press becoming a commercial enterprise in 1920. Leonard Woolf recalls that prior to that time "the idea of seriously becoming professional publishers never occurred" to him and to Virginia Woolf. Apparently in 1920, Koteliansky brought them his translation of Gorky's Reminiscences of Tolstoi, and as Leonard Woolf recalls: He [Koteliansky] translated some of it to us and we saw at once that it was a masterpiece. If we published it, we should have to print at least 1,000 copies, a number which we could not possibly manage ourselves. We took the plunge and had 1,000 copies printed for us by the Pelican Press for £ 73. It was our first commercial venture. It was an immediate success and we had to reprint another 1,000 copies before the end of the year. Kot and I translated it and I do not think that I have ever got more aesthetic pleasure from anything than from doing that translation. It is one of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written. It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room - his greatness and his littleness, his entrancing and infuriating complexity, his titanic and poetic personality, his superb humour. The writing is beautiful; every word and every sentence are perfect, and there is not one superfluous word or sentence in the book. I got immense pleasure from trying to translate this ravishing Russian into adequate English.15 The book proved to be very successful, and its publication "was really the turning point for the future of the [Hogarth] Press". Koteliansky's further association with the Hogarth Press has been summarized by Leonard Woolf as follows: The three other commercially printed books which we published in 1922 were Russian; they came to us through Kot, and either Virginia or I collaborated with him in the translation of them. All three were remarkable. Two of them had just been published in Russia by the Soviet Leonard Woolf, "Kot", 172. Leonard Woolf, Autobiography: Downhill All The Way (London, Hogarth Press, 1967), 67.

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Government and came to Kot through Gorky: Stavrogin's Confession contained unpublished chapters of Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed and The Autobiography of Countess Sophie Tolstoi had been written in 1913 by Tolstoy's wife. The other book, Bunin's Gentleman from San Francisco, is one of the greatest of short stories.16 A s for the format of the books and the workmanship, Leonard Woolf says: These books, which I still think to be beautifully printed and bound, were very carefully designed by Virginia and me, and they were unlike the books published by other publishers in those days. They were bound in paper over boards and we took an immense amount of trouble to find gay, striking, and beautiful papers. The Dostoevsky and the Bunin were bound in very gay patterned paper which we got from Czechoslovakia, and the Tolstoy book in a very good mottled paper. We printed, I think, 1,000 of each of the three books and published the Bunin and Tolstoy at 4s. and the Dostoevsky at 6s. Each of them sold between 500 and 700 copies in twelve months and made us a small profit, and they went on selling until we reprinted or they went out of print.17 In outlining Koteliansky's part in the publications of the Hogarth Press, I have proceeded beyond the point at which Lawrence entered the scene as a collaborator. The importance of all of Koteliansky's translations in the study of Lawrence's response to Russian literature, however, cannot be over-emphasized. Lawrence's letters to Koteliansky consistently reveal that the latter made it a point to send Lawrence, as soon as possible, copies of the books he had translated. Thus Lawrence had ready access to all the Koteliansky translations which were published prior to 1930. Lawrence's reading of Russian literature was, therefore, broader than one might suppose, since it included familiarity with memoirs, letters, and autobiographies related to the Russian writers. In Chapter I, I have already discussed Lawrence's reading of such works; and I want now to turn more specifically to Lawrence's activities as a translator. What, we may ask, motivated Lawrence to collaborate with Koteliansky in the translation of Russian writers? Once again, the 16

«

Leonard Woolf, op. cit., 74. Ibid.

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contrast with Lawrence's translations of Italian becomes significant. Lawrence's motive for beginning his translation of Verga was his admiration for the work of the Italian writer. We have noted elsewhere that Lawrence preferred the short stories of Verga to those of the Russian Chekhov, and Lawrence's aim in providing English translations of Verga was to bring the Italian writer to the attention of the English reading public. Writing to Catherine Carswell 25 October 1921, Lawrence says: I have only been reading Giovanni Verga lately. He exercises quite a fascination on me, and makes me feel quite sick at the end. But perhaps that is only if one knows Sicily. - Do you know if he is translated into English? - I Malavoglia or Mastro-don Gesualdo - or Novelle Rusticane, or the other short stories. It would be fun to do him - his language [Lawrence's italics] is so fascinating (C.L., II, 668).

Lawrence adds that Verga is the "only Italian who does interest me", and he describes the challenge which a translation of Verga into English would present: He is extraordinarily [Lawrence's italics] good - peasant - quite modern Homeric - and it would need somebody who could absolutely handle English in the dialect, to translate him. He would be most awfully difficult to translate. That is what tempts me: though it is rather a waste of time, and probably I shall never do it. Though if I don't, I doubt if anyone else will - adequately, at least (C.L., II, 674).

Admiration for Verga and a personal challenge: these are the two motives for Lawrence's translations of Italian. To see what motivated Lawrence's collaboration in translating the Russians, we have to turn to the story of S. S. Koteliansky's publication of Shestov's All Things Are Possible (London, 1920). 2 Leo Shestov was the pseudonym of Lev Isaakovich Schwartzman (1866-1938). Although his work in Russian began to appear in 1898, he was virtually unknown to English readers until S. S. Koteliansky first brought Shestov's work before the English read-

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ing public in 1916 when he published Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays by Leon [sic] Shestov. The book consists of four essays: "Anton Tchekhov (Creation from the Void)"; "The Gift of Prophecy [on Dostoevsky]"; "Penultimate Words"; and "The Theory of Knowledge". I have given the titles of the essays because in 1917 there appeared in the United States a book by Leon [jic] Shestov entitled Penultimate Words and Other Essays published in Boston by John W. Luce and Company. The book contains the same four essays printed in the same order as they are in Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays for which J. M. Murry had written a "Foreword". Although during the years 1916 and 1917 Lawrence, Murry, and Koteliansky were in close association, Lawrence appears not to have known about Koteliansky's translation of Shestov's book until he began to work on All Things Are Possible.1* Lawrence's earliest reference to Shestov appears in a letter probably dated 2 August 1919 which begins: "I have done a certain amount of the translation - Apotheosis. I began "Russian Spirit," but either Shestov writes atrociously - I believe he does - or you translate loosely" (Q.R., 184). 19 Several days later, Lawrence reported that he had "done 71 of the Shestov paragraphs - more than half" (Q.R., 185), and in a letter probably dated 10 August 1919 he had finished going over Part I, hoping that "Part II is not so long as Part I " (Q.R., 186). A s for having his own work acknowledged, Lawrence says: " I don't want my name printed as a translator. It won't do for me to appear to dabble in too many things" (Q.R., 186). Lawrence completed his part in the translation by ?29 August 1919, and he wrote to Koteliansky as follows: I have finished Shestov - have compressed him a bit, but left nothing out - only " s o to speak" and "as all k n o w " and many such phrases and volatile sentences - no substance [Lawrence's italics] at all - sometimes I have added a word or two, for the sake of the sense - as I did in "Russian Spirit." What I leave out I leave out deliberately. There is a manywordedness often, which becomes cloying, wearying. - I do get tired of See Q.R., 190. A number of these letters were published for the first time in Q.R. For the problems of dating these letters, see my Note I to Letter No. 164 (Q.R., 184).

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his tilting with "metaphysics," positivism, Kantian postulates, and so on But I like [Lawrence's italics] his "flying in the face of Reason,'' like a cross hen. I don't know what I have done with the "Russian Spirit," which you returned to me. I have written to Pangbourne to see if it's there. If not, I shall have to copy it out from your MS. - let me have the preface as soon as possible: also everything you know about Shestov, and I'll write a tiny introduction and we'll approach the publishers (C.L., 1,591-92). The manuscript which Lawrence "compressed" has been preserved in his handwriting, but since no copy of the original text which Koteliansky supplied appears to exist, it is not possible to determine the extent of Lawrence's revision. 20 The "Russian Spirit", which Lawrence mentions, was published as part of All Things Are Possible (233-42), but the essay was first offered for publication by Koteliansky to a periodical, probably to The English Review, edited by Austin Harrison. 21 Lawrence's self-assurance in undertaking the job of revision suggests that for Lawrence the task was a pleasurable experience, and we must not overlook Lawrence's motive for undertaking the job: obviously he is holding out a helping hand to Koteliansky who needs financial assistance. The plan to "approach the publishers" is soon carried out. On 2 September 1919, Lawrence promptly writes to the London publisher Martin Seeker as follows: I have been editing, for a Russian friend of mine, a rather amusing, not very long translation of a book of philosophy by one of the last of the Russians, called Shestov. It is by no means a heavy work - nice and ironical and in snappy paragraphs. Would it be in your line? (L., 481-82). Seeker's answer is slow in coming, for in a letter dated ?24 September 1919, Lawrence writes to Koteliansky: "I have been a long time waiting to hear from Seeker. He always offers filthy terms. What do you say? Let me know, and then I'll write and tell him you'll see him and make the agreement direct. What about an American publisher? Shall I write to one, direct, or will you see an agent?" (C.L., I, 593-94). Seeker's reply must have come shortly afterwards, 20 The MS is described in Warren Roberts, A Bibliography ofD. H. Lawrence (London, 1963), 41-42. 21 See Q.R., 187.

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since we find Lawrence writing to W. B. Huebsch on 30 September 1919: I edited a translation of a Russian philosopher - Shestov - for a Russian friend of mine - Seeker will publish it in the spring - a short, amusing book, about 50,000, or 60,000 words. Would you like the sheets of that? let me know at once. - It's called Apotheosis of Groundlessness - written in short, ironical, amusing paragraphs (C.L., 1,596). Prompt as Seeker's initial action was, the book was not soon published. On 17 December 1919, Lawrence is again writing to Seeker: I enclose a letter from Koteliansky. I am perfectly willing to have the "Foreword" omitted altogether - my foreword, that is. Let Koteliansky know, will you, what you decide? And please arrange a title page to suit him, will you... I suppose I am to return to you the corrected proofs of Shestov. If so, be so good as to let me have a duplicate set for America... [P. S.] Possibly Koteliansky returns corrected proofs to you. If so, tant mieux. For me, my foreword is what I think! though it is immaterial to me whether you print or not. It is between you and Koteliansky, I suppose (Z,., 487). Apparently the correction of proofs was completed in fewer than ten days, for Lawrence writes to Seeker on 27 December 1919: " I hope you got the proofs of Shestov which I returned. Please send me a nice little vol. of corrected proofs, will you, for America" (L., 488). The New Year arrives, but the Shestov book still has not been published. On 29 January 1920, Lawrence, now in Capri, writes to W. B. Huebsch, "When you get Shestov, if you can see your way to do so, just buy the American rights for a certain sum - no royalties for Koteliansky's sake" (C.L., I, 618-19). Koteliansky obviously needs money, but book publishing is not a business which is noted for speed. It is April and the book is not out. Koteliansky writes a registered letter to Lawrence dated 13 April 1920 and wants to know what is happening. Lawrence replies 7 May 1920 giving a detailed summary of the negotations to date. The details of the negotiations are interesting, but the significant point for us is that Koteliansky's offer of half the royalties is turned down by Lawrence: " I do [Lawrence's italics] wish you would make my share in Shestov

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one-fourth. A half is too much" (C.L., I, 627). By the time the Shestov book was published, Koteliansky had found other sources of income. The role which Lawrence played in the translation of Shestov's All Things Are Possible may now be quickly summarized. In the first place it is evident that Lawrence never examined the Russian text of Shestov's work. As his letters to Seeker and Huebsch reveal, Lawrence did not regard himself as a translator of Shestov but looked upon his role as that of "editing a translation". His function was to revise Koteliansky's translation in order to make the work more acceptable for publication. Lawrence's motive for engaging in the work was a genuine attempt to help his friend Koteliansky financially. The publication of All Things Are Possible did not cause much stir on either side of the Atlantic. The London Times Literary Supplement merely carried a notice of the book; in New York the response was more enthusiastic. Benjamin de Casseres entitled his review of the book "Shestov's Challenge to Civilization", and described Shestov as "a Russian still living at the age of 50" belonging "in the high line of iconoclasts". Lawrence's was "a brilliantly written foreword" and Shestov's style "clear, uncollegiate and literary". 22 The book was not a success. Lawrence tried to cheer Koteliansky up: " A s for the Shestov, wait, he will start later. It is not all over" (C.L., I, 633), but for all practical purposes Shestov had not come through. 3

Despite the problems which Lawrence had encountered in his collaboration with Koteliansky in Shestov's All Things Are Possible, it was not long before Lawrence was again helping his friend in editing a translation of another Russian writer. It is important for the literary record to point out that apart from an English translation of "The Gentleman from San Francisco", which had been made by Abraham Yarmolinsky in America in 1918, Koteliansky's Benjamin de Casseres, "Shestov's Challenge to Civilization", New York Times Book Review and Magazine (3 October 1920), 19.

22

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English translation was the first to be published in England. 23 The exact day on which Lawrence received Koteliansky's manuscript of "The Gentleman from San Francisco" can be established by referring to Lawrence's letter to Koteliansky dated 16 June 1921: Yesterday " T h e Gent, from S. Francisco" and the pen: very many thanks. Have read "The G e n t . " - and in spite of its lugubriousness, grin with j o y . . . I will soon get it written over: don't think your text needs much altering. I love a "little carved peeled-off d o g " - it is too good to alter... A n d I really think The Dial might print " T h e G e n t . " A n d if so, we get at least 100 dollars. G o o d for us! (C.L., II, 656).

The initiative for the translation of Bunin has obviously come from Koteliansky, but Lawrence's enthusiasm must not be overlooked nor the accuracy of his prediction that The Dial might publish the story. 24 The revisions which Lawrence planned to make were not extensive, nor is there any evidence to suggest that Lawrence later changed his opinion. However, a "little carved peeled-off dog" did not, after all, prove "too good to alter". In The Dial version, it became " a tiny, cringing, peeled-off little dog"; by the time that the story appeared in book form, the animal had become " a tiny, cringing, hairless little dog", and Koteliansky's originality was thus obliterated. After revising Koteliansky's manuscript, Lawrence must have sent it directly to The Dial, which probably explains the appearance of Lawrence's name as one of the translators. It is likely that Lawrence and Koteliansky had agreed not to acknowledge Lawrence's part in the collaboration, but that the editor of The Dial, of his own accord, included the names of both men when "The Gentleman from San Francisco" was published in The Dial in January, 1922. 23 Yarmolinsky's translation was published in a book with the following title: Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev [and] The Gentleman from San Francisco by Ivan Bunin (Boston, The Stratford Company, Publishers, 1918), 32-58. 24 The Dial published "The Gentleman from San Francisco" translated by S. S. Koteliansky and D. H. Lawrence (January 1922), 47-68. Lawrence's share of the proceeds was £ 12.1.0. An entry in his diary for 29 December 1921, reads: "Received £ 12.1.0. from Kot. as half Gent, from San Francisco proceeds." See Tedlock, E. W. Jr., The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, A Descriptive Bibliography (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1948), 95-

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Certainly this seems to be the basis for Lawrence's letter to Koteliansky dated 14 January 1922: "I had the Dial by the same post as your letter. They are impudent people, I had told them not to put my name. Of course they did it themselves. But I don't really care. Why bother" (C.L., II, 684). Nevertheless, Koteliansky was pleased with Lawrence's revisions of the manuscript, for Lawrence says in the same letter, "I am glad you like "The Gent" when he was done." The publication of Bunin's story in The Dial was Lawrence's first public appearance in the role of a translator, but as in the case of Shestov's book the role was really that of an editor. Without Koteliansky's manuscript, we cannot study the changes which Lawrence made in the translation of "The Gentleman from San Francisco" since we have no way of knowing from the printed version which words or phrases are Koteliansky's and which ones are Lawrence's. The only exception is "a little carved peeled-oif dog". And even in this minute element, there are uncertainties. Lawrence might have, after all, left the phrase as "a little carved peeled-offdog", and it might have been altered by the editor of The Dial. Then again, if Lawrence had altered Koteliansky's version and made it "a tiny cringing peeled-off dog", who was it that changed "peeled-off" to "hairless" when the book came out? Who corrected the proofs of "The Gentleman from San Francisco?" The importance of these questions lies in the fact that there are a large number of differences between the text of "The Gentleman from San Francisco" published in The Dial (January, 1922) and the text of the story published in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories.25 The differences in these texts have apparently The first British edition was published in May, 1922. See: Bunin, I. A . The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories. Translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. A tipped-in title-page erratum note explains, "The first story in this book... is translated by D. H. Lawrence and S. S. Koteliansky. Owing to a mistake Mr. Lawrence's name has been omitted from the titlepage." The first American edition appeared in January 1923. See: Bunin, I. A . The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories. The Translation of these Stories was made by D. H. Lawrence, S. S. Koteliansky, and Leonard Woolf (New York, Thomas Seltzer, 1923). The text of "The Gentleman from San Francisco" in both books is the same. 26

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not been noted by Lawrence bibliographers; neither Edward McDonald nor Warren Roberts make any references to these changes, but they are too numerous to be ignored by a serious student of Lawrence.26 Let me now try to account for the variations. If D. H. Lawrence is not himself responsible for the book version of Bunin's story the role of Lawrence as translator may well be even smaller than that which scholars have recognized till now. A knowledge of Lawrence's movements may help to elucidate these matters. We know that Lawrence was living at the Hotel Krone, Ebersteinburg, in June 1921 when he received the original manuscript of "The Gentleman from San Francisco" from S. S. Koteliansky. By the time The Dial (January, 1922) had printed the story, Lawrence had moved to Fontana Vecchia, Taormina; and when the book was first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf (May, 1922), Lawrence had left Sicily (February, 1922). When the book came out Lawrence was either in West Australia or on his way to New South Wales. In any case, if Lawrence were to correct the proofs he would have had to do so en route to Australia via Ceylon where he stayed from 13 March 1922 to 24 April 1922. This possibility is rather unlikely, and the published correspondence supplies no evidence to support the idea of Lawrence ever having received the proofs of "The Gentleman from San Francisco". It seems reasonable to assume that someone in England must have corrected the proofs of the story; the uncertainty of Lawrence's whereabouts would have made it difficult to have the proofs mailed to Lawrence, and would almost certainly have delayed the publication of the Bunin book. In any event, Koteliansky had ready assistance at hand in the persons of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who would have been easily capable of making the textual changes which I have outlined. If we go back to Leonard Woolf's description of how he and Koteliansky worked together on translations, which we quoted earlier (44-45), we can begin to explain what must have happened to See Edward D . McDonald, A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence (Philadelphia, Centaur Book Shop, 1925) and Warren Roberts, A Bibliography ofD. H. Lawrence (Soho Bibliographies; London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963). 29

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the magazine version of the Koteliansky-Lawrence translation of Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco". Oddly enough, the "peeled-off little dog" gives us a clue. In recalling this description of the dog, recalled inaccurately, for the lady does not come "into the room carrying in her arms a peeled-off little dog", but holds the dog on a chain, Leonard Woolf reveals his part in the translation of "The Gentleman from San Francisco". It is all but certain that it was Leonard Woolf who revised the magazine version of Bunin's short story; otherwise, why should Woolf, after over thirty years, allude to a phrase in a story which he is supposed not to have translated. Woolf's description of the Koteliansky method of translation also reveals why it was impractical for Lawrence to collaborate on other translations with Koteliansky; owing to his travels, Lawrence simply would not have been able to sit down with Koteliansky to go through a translation sentence by sentence. The role which Leonard Woolf played in the revision of "The Gentleman from San Francisco", as is suggested by the example I have cited, was probably confined to changes which did not substantially affect the quality of the magazine version. And credit for the success of the initial version must go to Koteliansky and Lawrence. Renato Poggioli, an authority on Russian literature, has called the translation "the best of all English versions of the most masterly of Bunin's short stories". 27 Long before Poggioli's verdict, Edwin Muir in a review of The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, said, "The translations are probably the best that have been made in English from the Russian tongue." 28 Nor was Muir alone in his judgment; Isadore Lhevinne wrote, "The stories are excellently translated, in a manner that does not fail to render all the pathos and lyric suggestiveness of Bunin." 29 One cannot doubt that it was D. H. Lawrence's unique talent that was to some degree responsible for the high quality of the translation, and we must agree with the anonymous reviewer who said that the book is "of the first order, and has evidently been lucky in its translators". 27

Renato Poggioli, The Phoenix and the Spider (Harvard University Press,

1957). 156. 28 29

The Dial, LXXTV (April 1923), 413. International Book Review (April 1923), 54.

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4 Lawrence's involvement in Koteliansky's translations of Shestov and Bunin has been known for some time, but his involvement in yet another of Koteliansky's translations was discovered only recently. From the letters which were published for the first time in The Quest for Rananim: D. H. Lawrence's Letters to S. S. Koteliansky it is clear that Lawrence also had an important hand in polishing up Koteliansky's translation of Maxim Gorky's Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev. In order to appreciate Lawrence's role in this translation, it is necessary to outline the publication history of this work. The "Reminiscences" were first published in The Adelphi, I (No. 9, February 1924), 806-20; I (No. 10, March 1924), 892-905; I (No. 11, April 1924), 983-89. Two months later the "Reminiscences" were also published in serial form in The Dial as follows: June 1924, 481-92; July 1924, 31-43; August 1924, 105-20. A s published by The Adelphi, the work was ostensibly translated by Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky, for at the conclusion of both the second and the third installments we find this note: "Authorized Translation by Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky". Similarly, in The Dial version, each of the three parts is preceded by the following note: "Translated From the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and Katherine Mansfield". The "Reminiscences" in book form were first published by William Heinemann in 1931 in a deluxe edition.30 The edition was limited to 750 copies, and a note informed the reader of the following "facts": "This translation, which is authorized by Maxim Gorki, was made by Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky during the last stay of the former in England, August-September, 1922." Katherine Mansfield died in January 1923; but the "Reminiscences" apparently had been translated by Koteliansky and edited by Katherine Mansfield during the preceding year, even though The "Reminiscences" were again published as follows: Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev by Maxim Gorky, Authorized translation from the Russian by Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (London, The Hogarth Press, 1934), 117-91. 30

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they were not published for the first time until February 1924. If we examine a letter which Lawrence wrote to Koteliansky on 7 August 1923, we learn that Lawrence, who was in New York at that time, informed Koteliansky that he would obtain the M S of the "Reminiscences" from The Dial, to which Koteliansky had submitted it for publication in the U.S. On 13 August 1923, Lawrence received the MS, already accepted for publication, and was "going through it at once". And on 17 August 1923, Lawrence wrote to Koteliansky as follows: "I went through your Gorky MS. & returned it to Dial [sic]. I made the English correct - & a little more flexible - but didn't change the style, since it was yours and Katharine's [s/c]. But the first ten pages were a bit crude" (Q.R., 259). Here, then, is conclusive evidence of Lawrence's part in revising the Koteliansky-Mansfield MS of Gorky's Reminiscences of Andreyev. It is not known whether The Adelphi version of the "Reminiscences" was printed from the original text prepared by Koteliansky and Katherine Mansfield or whether the MS as revised by Lawrence was used, but it is interesting to note that The Adelphi version and The Dial version are different, and that the differences are not only minor changes in wording here and there. Substantial passages which one finds in The Dial version do not appear at all in The Adelphi version; in addition, the last twelve pages of The Dial version are completely left out of The Adelphi version. Even if The Adelphi version is based on the original Koteliansky MS, it is still impossible to determine the changes that Lawrence made in the MS when he revised it for The Dial. In order to illustrate the problem, let me quote the beginning of the "Reminiscences" in The Adelphi version: In the spring of 18981 read in the Moscow Courier a story called Bergamot and Garaska - an Easter story of the usual type. Written to appeal to the heart of the holiday reader, it reminded him once again that man is still capable, at certain moments and in certain special circumstances, of a feeling of generosity, and that at times enemies become friends, if only for a short while, if only for a day (The Adelphi, I [February 1924], 806). If we now look at the beginning of The Dial version, we see the following:

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In the spring of 1898 I read in the Moscow Courier [sic] a story called Bergamot [j/c] and Garaska [izc], an Easter story of the usual type, written to appeal to the heart of the holiday reader. It reminded the world once again that man, at certain moments and in certain special circumstances, is still capable of generosity, and that occasionally enemies become friends, even if it doesn't last longer than a day. Since Gogol's The Overcoat [s/c], Russian writers must have written hundreds or even thousands of such deliberately pathetic stories; they are, so to speak, the dandelions scattered among the superb flowers of genuine Russian literature, and are meant to brighten the beggarly life of the sick and rigid Russian soul. But out of that story came the strong evidence of a talent which reminded me somewhat of Pomialovsky; also one glimpsed a roguish little smile on the author's face, a smile of mistrust of facts he chose to conceal; which little smile easily reconciled me to the inevitable, forced sentimentalism of Easter-tide and Christmas-season literature (The Dial [June 1924], 481). It seems plausible that the changes in grammar and diction in the first paragraph represent Lawrence's revisions; but what about the two paragraphs that are missing from The Adelphi version? The second paragraph about "genuine Russian literature" sounds like Lawrence, but the third paragraph with its mention of Pomialovsky (a writer who is nowhere else mentioned by Lawrence) sounds as if it were part of the original Koteliansky-Mansfield text. On the other hand, Lawrence might have known of Pomialovsky's work, and simply wrote this passage into The Dial version as well. Another passage which also sounds like Lawrence's writing begins: It is very difficult to speak of a man whom you know and know profoundly. That sounds like a paradox; but it is true. When the mysterious thrill that emanates from the flame of another's ego is felt by you, agitates you, you fear to touch with your oblique heavy words the invisible rays of the soul that is dear to you; you fear lest you express things wrongly. You don't want to mutilate what you feel and what is almost indefinable in words; you dare not enclose in your constrained speech that which is the essence of another, even though it be universally valid, of human value {The Dial [July 1924], 32). The text continues in this vein for four more paragraphs. The passage "the flame of another's ego" and other such passages seem

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to me to be characteristic of Lawrence, but without further corroborating evidence, we cannot be certain that these passages are not merely passages that the editor of The Adelphi decided to omit. The problem of trying to identify Lawrence's revisions is further complicated in that the editor of The Dial appears to have omitted parts of the MS as well. The passage in The Adelphi version beginning, "One of the girls, plump, soft and agile as a mouse, told us, almost with rapture, how the Assistant Crown Prosecutor had bitten her leg above the knee" (895) and ending with "The hat settles it! Hooray!" (897) is, for example, omitted from The Dial version. If we try to compare the two published versions of the "Reminiscences", we come to the conclusion that what we have is not the text of the original Koteliansky-Manfield MS and the text of the MS revised by Lawrence; instead, we have a text in The Adelphi which has been changed to suit that magazine's editorial policies, and the text of the Koteliansky-Mansfield MS as revised by Lawrence, with some editorial changes by The Dial. Therefore, the only way in which Lawrence's revisions could now be identified would be by comparing the original Koteliansky-Mansfield M S with The Dial version, and even here we would still have to allow for The Dial editor's possible revisions. To establish authentically Lawrence's revisions we would have to examine the MS on which he worked; a conclusion based on anything short of this kind of evidence is in the final analysis open to question.

5 We have now examined the role which D. H. Lawrence played in the translations of Shestov, Bunin, and Gorky; but Rota's letter to Harry T. Moore states that Lawrence was also involved in the translation of F. M. Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor. Is there any supporting evidence for such an assertion? The only reference to the book in Lawrence's published correspondence is in a letter to S. S. Koteliansky dated 9 January 1930: " I was just writing about the impossibility of fitting the Christian religion to the State - send me The Grand Inquisitor, and I'll see if I can do an introduction. Tell

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me how long you'd like it" (C.L., II, 1233). The introduction was written, but Koteliansky's translation did not appear until after Lawrence's death at which time the introduction was also published. It has been conjectured "that it was for Kot that he [Lawrence] did his last pieces of writing - a review of Kot's translation of Rozanov's Fallen Leaves and an introduction to a new translation, also by Kot, of the "Grand Inquisitor" section of The Brothers Karamazov."31 On the very limited evidence we have available, we can only speculate as to Lawrence's possible collaboration in the translation of The Grand Inquisitor. As the letter to Koteliansky shows, all that Koteliansky had asked Lawrence to do was merely to write an introduction; there is no reason to suppose that Koteliansky would have hesitated to ask Lawrence to revise the short manuscript if he had so desired. Interestingly enough Lawrence's manuscript of his introduction to The Grand Inquisitor has been preserved, and it is this manuscript which may hold the key to why Koteliansky did not ask Lawrence for editorial assistance. The bibliographic description of the manuscript is given as follows: Title, Lawrence's hand, "Introd. to The Grand Inquisitor." Lawrence's hand in ink, written on both sides, interlinear revision and correction. Pagination: 1-14, 7 blank leaves remaining in notebook. Paper crossruled graph paper, 6 7 /s" x 8 7 /s", fourteen leaves intact in light brown covers of notebook for French school children. Front cover bears in ink Lawrence's hand, "Intro, to Grand Inquisitor / D. H. L." and just below, "for Koteliansky or Mrs. Henderson."32 If we only knew more about Mrs. Henderson, we might be able to solve the mystery. It is probable that the woman was Koteliansky's editorial collaborator, and there was therefore no need for Koteliansky to obtain Lawrence's help - an introduction only was required. When the book was published, there was no mention of Mrs. Henderson, and we have no subsequent record of her which 31 K . W. Gransden, "Rananim: D . H. Lawrence's Letters to S. S. Koteliansky", Twentieth Century, C L I X (January 1956), 32. 32 E. W. Tedlock, Jr., The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, 250.

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might connect her with the translation of The Grand Inquisitor. There is, however, a Mrs. Henderson listed in "Who's Who in the Lawrence Letters": "Born Alice Corbin, Mrs. William Penhallow Henderson was an associate of Harriet Monroe's on Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. She knew Lawrence during his residence in New Mexico (1922-25)" (C.L., I, xxxix). The information given by Moore does not help us. 33 6 Before bringing this chapter to a close, we must attempt to define Lawrence's role as a translator of Russian literature. We know for certain only that he was directly involved in the translation of three Russian works: Leo Shestov's All Things Are Possible (1920), Ivan Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco" (1922), and Maxim Gorky's Reminiscences of Andreyev (1923). There is no evidence to support the conjecture that Lawrence and Koteliansky collaborated in the translation of "Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor or other translations". Lawrence's role as a translator of Russian literature appears to be rather limited. There are several good reasons for this conclusion. As we have already seen, Lawrence did not have a reading knowledge of Russian; at best he could only go over somebody's English text and edit that. Such a method is, of course, only feasible if the person who can read Russian and the editor are able to work side by side. After 1919, Lawrence travelled a great deal, and there would have been little opportunity, if any, for him to work side by side with Koteliansky. In addition, Lawrence's own creative work would hardly have allowed time for further collaborations. (It is perhaps significant that Lawrence did his translations of Verga on board ship on his way to Ceylon.) To have a collaborator such as Lawrence, who was constantly on the move, would hardly have been 33 The obituary notices of Mrs. Alice Corbin Henderson provide no clues either. See Poetry, LXXIV (Summer 1949), 370-71 and Publishers Weekly, CLVI (6 August 1949), 579. None of the literary activities mentioned in these accounts suggest any possible connection with Lawrence's Foreword to The Grand Inquisitor.

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satisfactory for Koteliansky. If Lawrence had collaborated with Koteliansky on other translations, these works would have to have been translated prior to the collaboration on Shestov in 1919-20. My bibliography of S. S. Koteliansky's translations indicates that J. M. Murry, Gilbert Cannan, and Philip Tomlinson were Koteliansky's collaborators up to the time that All Things Are Possible was published in 1920. After 1920, Koteliansky received assistance from Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Leonard Woolf. Koteliansky does not seem to have had difficulty finding collaborators for his translations. Limited as Lawrence's role was, however, his contribution to the translation of Russian literature ought not to be overlooked. Despite the fact that the translations of Shestov's works Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays, and All Things Are Possible are both considered "highly unsatisfactory" 34 the Koteliansky-Lawrence translation of Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco", as I have pointed out, has received very high praise. Bunin's short story has continued to appear in anthologies, though not always, it is true, in the Koteliansky-Lawrence version.35 Bunin's position as a major writer was, of course, established in 1933 when he received the Nobel Prize for literature, and it is reasonable to assume that as long as Bunin's fiction attracts readers D. H. Lawrence's name as a collaborator in the translation of an important Russian work will also continue to receive attention.36 Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that, as a translator of Russian literature, D. H. Lawrence plays only a very minor role. We have seen, however, that D. H. Lawrence's reading of Russian writers was both extensive and intensive. In his "Foreword" to Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Lawrence writes: See Prince D . S. Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature (New York, A . Knopf, 1926), 351. 35 For a discussion of the problems posed by the use of an inaccurate translation of "The Gentleman from San Francisco", see Edward Wasiolek, " A Classic Maimed: A Translation of Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco" Examined", College English, X X (1958), 25-28. 38 For a recent critical evaluation of Bunin's story see Seymour L. Gross, "Nature, Man, and God in Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco"", MFS, VI (Summer i960), 153-63. 34

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Two bodies of modern literature seem to me to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American. Let us leave aside the more brittle bits of French or Marinetti or Irish production, which are perhaps over the verge. Russian and American. And by American I do not mean Sherwood Anderson, who is so Russian. I mean the old people, little thin volumes of Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman. These seem to me to have reached a verge, as the more voluminous Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Artzibashev reached a limit on the other side (S., viii). Writing on 9 October 1925 to the Swiss critic Carl Seelig, with w h o m he planned to visit Russia, Lawrence says: " Y e s , the Russian novelists have meant a great deal to m e . " 3 7 Because Lawrence is himself a major writer of modern literature, it is important to examine his criticism o f Russian literature, particularly his criticism o f the great Russian novelists, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Accordingly, the next two chapters of our study will attempt to describe Lawrence's response t o the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in terms of Lawrence's literary criticism and o f his own artistic achievement as a novelist.

87 The quotation is from Collected Letters, II, 859. For Lawrence's plans to visit Russia with Carl Seelig, see Armin Arnold, "In the Footsteps of D. H. Lawrence in Switzerland: Some New Biographical Material", TSLL, III (1961), 188.

Ill D . H. L A W R E N C E ' S R E S P O N S E T O T O L S T O Y

The South African writer Sarah Gertrude Millin recalls an incident which provides us with an interesting insight into Lawrence's involvement with the works of Tolstoy. Mrs. Millin had, she tells us, invited the Lawrences, Middleton Murry and Koteliansky to dinner: " T h e Lawrence party arrived very late, and without Mr. Koteliansky. There had been, it appeared, a row with Mr. Koteliansky about Tolstoi, and this row had made them late, and it had prevented Mr. Koteliansky from coming at all" ( C.B. , II, 310). 1 We are not told specifically what the disagreement involving Tolstoy was, and perhaps her guests did not go into details in explaining Koteliansky's absence to Mrs. Millin, but judging from what Lawrence has written about Tolstoy we may be sure that Tolstoy's personality and his works both received the brunt of Lawrence's denunciation. Although Lawrence makes a strong plea for separating the personality of a writer from his work and holds that the "proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it", (S., 2) his own criticism of other writers invariably involves very personal observations about the writers themselves. In discussing the works of Tolstoy, the critic can hardly avoid becoming involved in the character or personality of the writer; ironically enough, the case is the same with Lawrence. It is easy to see other parallels between Lawrence and Tolstoy. Indeed, it would be difficult to find another writer whom Lawrence resembles more. If it were necessary to establish for Lawrence another literary tradition than that in which F. R. Leavis places him, 1

For the probable date of the Millin dinner for Lawrence, see Note 35, C.B.,

n,5i3-i4-

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a good case could be made for seeing Lawrence as a direct descendant of Tolstoy. Our first task in this chapter will be to review the criticism which the resemblance between Lawrence and Tolstoy has already elicited. Because Lawrence's reading of Tolstoy is determined by what Lawrence believed to be the nature and function of the novelist it is necessary for us also to attempt a formulation of Lawrence's theory of the novel and his "metaphysic" or theory of being. Our next task will be an examination of Lawrence's critical pronouncements on Tolstoy and his works in an attempt to discover the reasons for Lawrence's ambivalent attitude to Tolstoy. Finally, we shall consider how Lawrence's major novels The Rainbow and Women in Love may be viewed as Lawrence's artistic response to his reading of Tolstoy and how in these works Lawrence may be said to be correcting Tolstoy's artistic vision. We have already seen that Lawrence's opinion of his first contacts with Tolstoy's work was one of admiration, that he regarded War and Peace and Anna Karenina as among the greatest books ever written. This admiration later changed to a jeering kind of condemnation perhaps best revealed in Lawrence's "pansy" on Tolstoy: But Tolstoi was a traitor to the Russia that needed him most, the clumsy, bewildered Russia so worried by the Holy Ghost. He shifted his job onto the peasants and landed them all on toast. 2

Lawrence appears to have felt that Tolstoy had betrayed Russia; in other words, that he had failed to express the vision of life which the Russians needed, that Tolstoy had abdicated his responsibility as a writer. What Russia needed, in terms of artistic vision, was the Holy Ghost; and what Tolstoy gave her in his art was "Christian2 The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, Collected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (2 vols.; New York, Viking Press, 1964), I, 536. See also "Fate and the Younger Generation", which begins, "It is strange to think of the Annas, the Vronskys, the / Pierces, all the Tolstoyan lot / wiped out" (The Complete Poems, 1,533).

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socialism" based on the doctrine of brotherly love. But if Tolstoy considered his mission as one of saving Russia did not Lawrence think o f himself as a savior of England and perhaps of the world? It is Lawrence who writes: "See if I am not Lord of the dark and moving hosts / Before I die." 3 Thus Lawrence's conception of his role as a writer is like Tolstoy's; both want to reform mankind. David Garnett pointed to the resemblance between Lawrence and Tolstoy in 1932: Indeed both in their gifts, and in the limitations they seem wantonly to have put to their intelligences and their art, there is a curious resemblance between Tolstoy and Lawrence. In their vitality, their astonishing understanding of women, their attitude toward science and toward the greatest works of art and toward other artists, in their desire to change the world spiritually by founding small communities, in their hatred of their disciples, in their desire to change the world and to withdraw from it, in all these and many other ways there is a curious parallelism between them. And if Tolstoy was a great artist spoiled by ideas, by religious impulses, so was Lawrence, only spoiled much more.4 W e may not agree with Garnett's assessment of Lawrence as an artist nor with his judgment that Tolstoy is the greater artist of the two, but we must admit that the parallels between the two writers are substantial. 1 Despite David Garnett's perceptive recognition of the similarities between Lawrence and Tolstoy, made as we have seen two years after Lawrence's death in 1930, literary critics have been slow in recognizing the striking parallels between the two writers. Richard Aldington's biography D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius But... (1950) makes no reference to Tolstoy; and Harry T. Moore's The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence (1951) says only: " O n e way of attempting to place Lawrence among his contemporaries would be to measure him in terms of Proust, Joyce, and Mann, the highest The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, 1,289. David Garnett, " A Whole Hive of Genius", Saturday Review of Literature (1 October 1932), 142. 3

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peaks rising between us and the great mountain range of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Henry James." 5 In D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), F. R. Leavis, although at times consciously thinking of Tolstoy and Lawrence, confines his observations to the relative experiences of the two writers with regard to "pronouncing normatively about marriage" in which Leavis sees "the great advantage enjoyed by the author of Anna Karenina". In another reference to Tolstoy, Leavis draws attention to the qualities shared by great novelists which "manifest themselves in ways that offer nothing to baffle, and everything to engage and convince, the reader who comes to Lawrence from George Eliot and Tolstoy". Leavis, indeed, devotes several pages to an analysis of Vronsky as the kind of artist whom Lawrence so vehemently condemns, the "uncreative "social" pseudo-artist", as Leavis calls him, as opposed to the "real artist" such as Lawrence himself. Yet this is as far as Leavis goes in establishing any connection between Lawrence and Tolstoy. It is not until 1959 that we get a serious attempt to examine the relationship between Lawrence and Tolstoy in an article entitled "Anna, Lawrence and "The L a w " " by Henry Gifford who says: "Lawrence came to self-realisation, I think, in some part through wrestling with Tolstoy, whose "marvellous sensuous understanding" he rated highly, but whose "metaphysic" he thought ignoble" (R.F., 148).6 The central purpose of Gifford's essay is to examine 6 Harry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence (First edition; London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1951), 314. In the revised edition of his book (New York, Twayne Publishers, 1964), Moore omits the reference to Tolstoy that I have cited and makes the following statement: " W e might understand the prophetic aspect of Lawrence more readily if we consider it in terms of that brilliant book on Tolstoy by Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, which looks at novelists and poets in terms of the statement of Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Lawrence, for all his identification with a fox in his story "TheFox," was essentially a hedgehog. What is important in his work is the power with which he expressed "one big thing" and its contingencies" (272).

Henry Gifford, "Anna, Lawrence and "The L a w " " , Critical Quarterly, I (Autumn, 1959), 203-06. This article as well as that by Raymond Williams, which is cited in Note 7, and Gilford's article cited in Note 8 are now conveniently reprinted in Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, Edited and with an Introduction by Donald Davie (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1965). All citations in my text are from this book, for which R.F. is the abbreviation. 6

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Lawrence's charge that in Anna Karenina Tolstoy is guilty of artistic immorality for he "puts his thumb in the scale" (Lawrence's words) and pulls "down the balance to his own predilections". Gifford's short essay lacks the kind of documentation which would enable the reader to track down the basis for the statements made in the essay. The Lawrence sources of Gifford's quotations are given in only two instances: Fantasia of the Unconscious and the essay on Cavalleria Rusticana. Nonetheless, Gifford makes clear that Lawrence's reading of Anna Karenina produced in him deep feelings of attraction and repulsion. Gifford points out that Tolstoy's novel is "a book that had engrossed him [Lawrence] in student days, and that later bore closely upon his own situation when he married Frieda". What attracts Lawrence is Tolstoy's creation of Anna, a woman who possesses real feelings, or as Gifford phrases it: "Tolstoy seems to have isolated in Anna, and to some extent in her brother, the pride of the individual life, the "quickness" that Lawrence so deeply cared for." What repels Lawrence is Tolstoy's sentence of destruction on Anna, his judgment of "her in the cherished name of the family, the idea of which possessed him [Tolstoy] at the time of writing this novel". Gifford says unequivocally: "The strategy of the novel is directed against Anna", and he concludes that Lawrence also takes this position. Lawrence's response to Anna Karenina, as we will see later, is rather more complex than Gifford has space to argue; it involves, among other things, Lawrence's ideas on how any novel ought to be read and his own "metaphysic" or theory of being. But the observation that Gifford makes is, I think, valid: according to Lawrence, Tolstoy sees Anna's conduct as a transgression of his own moral beliefs and, in the novel, she must perish. Gifford concludes that Tolstoy cannot face the issue, which will not work out for him in accordance with his moral beliefs. Anna must be destroyed. She has been forced into a hideous marriage with Karenin, and there is no way out except through her own destruction. Lawrence was perfectly right in sensing that Tolstoy is already waging war on theflesh(R.F., 152). The world of literary criticism would not be what it is if Gifford's

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views were to have remained unchallenged. And the critic who, as it were, jumps into the lists is Raymond Williams. What is perhaps most important in Williams's article is his immediate acknowledgment of the connection between Lawrence and Tolstoy. "Certainly Tolstoy's influence on Lawrence is important", says Williams: "Once we are given the beginning of the thread, we are surprised how far it leads us: especially from Anna Karenina to The Rainbow, St. Mawr and Lady Chatterley's Lover."7 The main objection which Williams raises to Gifford's article is concerned with Lawrence's charge that "when the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilections, that is immorality" and whether this charge can in fact be sustained against Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. Williams argues: In the case of Tolstoy, we are surely bound to say that the charge of distorting Anna Karenina can only be sustained if we find evidence, from the constituent characters and circumstances of the book, that either for external reasons, or through weakness or stupidity, the given logic of the situation was falsified. But this is very different from any such metaphor as "the scale" (R.F., 153-54). Williams goes on to plead for a reading of Anna's character in the context of the whole novel by pointing out that the Anna-VronskyKarenin story "occupies rather less than half of the actual narrative" and devotes a good deal of attention to examining Vronsky's character as contrasted with that of Levin "which is surely one of Tolstoy's major themes, and from which Levin emerges as undoubtedly the stronger man". Williams quite convincingly makes the point that Vronsky contributes to Anna's destruction, that he awakens passion in her, but that he is unable to sustain it. A n d the conclusion which Williams reaches is as follows: The action of Anna's tragedy is that she leaves one inadequate man for another; but the inadequacy of Karenin lay with an unawakened woman, the inadequacy of Vronsky with a woman grown to passion and demanding it as the continuing centre of her life... Anna, in her delayed rush of 7

Raymond Williams, "Lawrence and Tolstoy", Critical Quarterly, II (Spring,

i960), 33-39-

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feeling, must give herself wholly, without regard for safety, and whether she then survives depends on the quality of the man she is giving herself to (R.F., 157-58)The analysis which Williams gives of Anna Karenina is illuminating, but unfortunately Lawrence's response to the novel is pushed into the background. Except for criticizing Lawrence's metaphor of the "scale" and pointing out that "in Lady Chatterley's Lover, [Lawrence] created in Mellors not a Vronsky, but a Levin", Williams devotes most of his article to the logic of Tolstoy's novel. Williams insists: "Tolstoy's logic, given the elements he has created, is sound." Yet the question, and these are the words of Williams, remains: "did Tolstoy kill Anna, as a kind of renunciation of love?" For, and Williams recognizes the fact, "Lawrence is right to imply that in choosing these elements [i.e. which figure in the plot] Tolstoy was revealing himself." Williams argues that, unlike Lawrence, Tolstoy "set all his fiction in real society", a phrase, I think, which can hardly be accepted at face value, since Tolstoy is after all writing fiction. Lawrence contends that Tolstoy's personal view was different from the imposed morality which he puts into his novels, and Williams himself recognizes the "tensions" within the Russian writer: Tolstoy was torn by very deep tensions, not only because he was a particular kind of man, but because he went on living in his own society, with its own deep tensions, and in touch with his own errors, which he did not simply move on from. Aksinia, the serf-girl he had loved, scrubbed floors in his wife's house, and his son by her lived nearby. It is not, as it is sometimes put, a case of young rake turned old Puritan. It is a man watching his own life, in terms of a society which divided people and exacerbated their necessary difficulties (R.F., 158-59). Whether Williams makes a thoroughly convincing case for Tolstoy cannot be finally settled, but we cannot dismiss Williams's insistence on the inherent logic of Anna Karenina nor his reading of the main characters. As a creative writer with his own artistic vision to communicate, however, Lawrence could not look on Anna Karenina as dispassionately as Mr. Williams does. Literary criticism begets literary criticism, and Williams's reply

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brought forth a rejoinder from Gifford. 8 With his characteristic economy (or that of the editor), Gifford confines himself to three pages in trying to answer the questions raised by Williams. Gifford discusses the making of Anna Karenina and insists that "Anna was always, of course, at the book's centre." "There can be little doubt that it was Tolstoy the rigid moralist", says Gifford, "who planned this story." We also get an analysis of Karenin's character and some references to War and Peace, but Lawrence's views recede still further into the background, although Gifford maintains that "Lawrence's sense of a certain unresolved conflict in the work [Anna Karenina] (shared surely by many readers) finds a good deal of support in the evidence of these earlier drafts." In the end, Gifford leaves us with several unanswered questions about Tolstoy: W a s he [Tolstoy] lacerating himself when he drove A n n a to her destruction? It is difficult to prove. Certainly he has pursued relentlessly the logic of her situation: one might contend (especially in the light of his earlier drafts) that he argues the case against Anna. His logical victory is complete; but why did he need to embark on such an argument? W h a t led him to conceive Anna, to endow her so lavishly, and then to force her into an ugly marriage and a career of shame ending in a bloody death? There is an agony of spirit here which is never quite subdued by all the affirmations of virtue and responsibility in Levin's world (R.F., 163).

Gifford does not, however, have the final word. Some three years later Williams returns to the problems posed by Lawrence's criticism of Tolstoy. In "Tolstoy, Lawrence and Tragedy" Williams describes what he calls the two versions of tragedy. 9 "There is social tragedy: men destroyed by power and famine; a civilization destroyed or destroying itself. And then there is personal tragedy: men and women suffering and destroyed in their closest relationships; the individual knowing his destiny in a cold universe in which death and an ultimate spiritual isolation are alternative forms of the same suffering and heroism" (W., 633). Williams says that in both Tol8 Henry Gilford, "Further Notes on Anna Karenina", Critical Quarterly, II (Summer, i960), 158-60. 9 Raymond Williams, "Tolstoy, Lawrence and Tragedy", Kenyon Review, X X V (Autumn, 1963), 633-50. Subsequent references to this article will be given in parentheses within the text and abbreviated as W.

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stoy's Anna Karenina and Lawrence's Women in Love "an important relationship ends in tragedy, in a death given significance by the whole action." Another similarity between the two novels is that It is impossible to read either book without feeling the pressure of other experiences and other questions: sharply contrasted ways of living; questions of the nature of work and its relation to how a man lives; questions, finally, about the inward nature of a given civilization, which the form of each novel seems designed to dramatize (fV., 634). Williams also sees a relationship between Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover: The terms in which he [Lawrence] describes how Anna and Vronsky ought to have acted are virtually a description of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and this novel can be seen as a conscious answer to Anna Karenina. A woman leaves her husband who has gone dead to himself and to her. In leaving, she finds life in herself and in another. Society is defied by the principles of this new morality of experience (W., 636-37). W e are told again that Lawrence misreads Anna Karenina, but we are cautioned: "It is important to add that he only made this misreading as a critic and a moralist. When it came to his own novels, he remembered what Tolstoy had written and saw the issue quite differently" (W., 637). We cannot take the time here to follow what Williams describes as "the real action of Anna Karenina", a description which takes up at least half of the length of the essay. The analysis is, in any case, a re-working of a substantial portion of Williams's first essay "Lawrence and Tolstoy". The part of the second essay which is new and which is, therefore, more significant is the development of the thesis that "Lawrence the critic was put right, in one important instance, by Lawrence the novelist" (W., 644). This thesis results in an analysis of Women in Love, and we will consider its implications when we examine The Rainbow as an instance of Lawrence's artistic response to Tolstoy. Before bringing to a close this summary of criticism concerning Lawrence and Tolstoy, I wish to draw attention to two more studies which have some bearing on the subject. The first of these is David

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J. Gordon's article called "D. H. Lawrence's Quarrel with Tragedy", and the second is an essay by F. R. Leavis. Gordon's article was initially published in Perspective, XIII (Winter, 1964); it has since been reprinted, with slight revisions, in Gordon's book D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic (New Haven and London, 1966). Although Lawrence's relation to the tragic vision lies somewhat beyond the scope of my study, his quarrel with tragedy, as Gordon phrases it, does account in part for Lawrence's criticism of Tolstoy. The following paragraph from Gordon's article is particularly relevant: Anna Karenina is a vital book, showing us how sexuality becomes destructive in an unbalanced culture. What is un-vital in Tolstoi is Tolstoiism, the ideal of Christian brotherhood with which Tolstoi tries to "get beyond his death conclusion." (This is meant to be an aesthetic judgment, by the way, as well as a moral one. It is based on the perception

that Pierre in War and Peace and the Prince in Resurrection, carriers of that ideal, are not as vivid as Anna and Vronsky). Of course for Lawrence there is a third possibility which Tolstoi ignores, the possibility of sex as a life-giving force enabling man to be renewed in the larger world, a force which need neither be destructive nor sublimated into an ideal of the spirit. Instead of seeking death or salvation, which are merely different expressions of the same prejudice against the adequacy of earthly life and thus rationalizations of spite or envy, Tolstoi might have been true to his own "column of blood," which reverenced the Anna-Vronsky relationship more than the social law that destroyed them. 10

The significant point that Gordon makes is that Lawrence "fights with Tolstoi (or really with culture through Tolstoi) not so much for what he wrote as for what he failed to see in what he wrote, for his prejudice against Anna, which is apparent not simply in the fact of her death, but in her not being given enough strength [as, we might interject here, Ursula Brangwen is given by Lawrence] to fight society on equal terms."11 Although F. R. Leavis omits any discussion of Lawrence and Tolstoy in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London, 1955), he later does raise the connection between the two writers in "Anna Karenina: 10

David J. Gordon, " D . H. Lawrence's Quarrel with Tragedy", Perspective, XIII (Winter, 1964), 140-41. 11

Ibid.

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Thought and Significance in a Great Creative Work". Leavis sets for himself the following task: T o confute James's critical censures and show what is the nature of the "composition" that makes Anna Karenina superlatively a great work of art is to illustrate what D . H. Lawrence had in mind when he wrote: " T h e novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo's telescope or somebody else's wireless. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained" [quotation marks added]. 12

In his assessment of Tolstoy's novel, Leavis returns again and again to Lawrence's critical pronouncements about the art of the novel, and the essay appears to be a reading of Anna Karenina in terms of Lawrence's artistic creed. The case for "the European novel", as Leavis describes Anna Karenina, is convincingly presented: the novel, we are told, concerns itself with "a deep spontaneous lived question", it exemplifies Lawrence's maxim, "Art speech is the only speech"; in short, it is a novel which says with validity and force: "This is life." The paradox that confronts Leavis, however, is that "the European novel", even if it meets the standards set by Lawrence is, according to him, not an entirely satisfactory work of art. When Lawrence suggests, for example, that Vronsky and Anna "couldn't live in the pride of their sincere passion, and spit in Mother Grundy's eye", Leavis finds it "astonishing that so marvellously perceptive a critic as Lawrence could simplify in that way, with so distorting an effect". Lawrence's criticism, according to Leavis, needs correction. Lawrence's diagnosis of Vronsky's and Anna's problem is "too simple" because Lawrence fails to see the complexity of the situation presented by the novel. In trying to correct Lawrence, Leavis attempts a comparison of Vronsky and Anna, and Lawrence and Frieda; but even if the parallels have some relevance, the analysis of characters in fiction as if they were characters in life is hardly convincing. Surely, to suggest F. R. Leavis, "Anna Karenina" and Other Essays (London, Chatto and Windus, 1967), 10-11. For a review which is severely critical of this book see Philip Rahv, "On Leavis and Lawrence", The New York Review of Books (26 September 1968).

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that Vronsky and Lawrence have anything in common is misleading, to say the least. And who can seriously compare or contrast Frieda with Anna Karenina? If Lawrence is to be compared with anyone, it is with the author of Anna Karenina and not with one of the characters in that novel. Our summary of criticism has forced us to get ahead of ourselves in looking at Lawrence's response to his reading of Tolstoy, and it is necessary now to go back and examine the basis on which the criticism rests; in other words, we must bring together Lawrence's pronouncements on Tolstoy. Before doing this, however, we must attempt to formulate Lawrence's theory of the novel, since his criticism of Tolstoy necessarily derives from what he regards the nature and the function of the novel to be. 2 Although D. H. Lawrence wrote five essays on the novel there is no single essay which completely expresses his theory. In any attempt to formulate a statement of Lawrence's theory of the novel and to show how this theory is related to his criticism of the Russian novelists, it is necessary to refer to some of Lawrence's works which on the surface seem to be unrelated to literary criticism. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Fantasia of the Unconscious, and Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine are all as relevant to Lawrence's theory of the novel as are such more specific works of literary criticism as the "Study of Thomas Hardy", "The Novel", "Why the Novel Matters", "Morality and the Novel", "Surgery for the Novel - or a Bomb", "The Novel and the Feelings", Studies in Classic American Literature, and The Symbolic Meaning. Despite the seemingly endless statements and restatements which are found in these works there is, I believe, a unity in Lawrence's critical approach to the novel. In drawing my conclusions about Lawrence's theory from his expository writings and then trying to show how the theory applies to his criticism of other novelists, in particular to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I am reversing the procedure which Lawrence ascribes to himself when he says:

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The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man (F., 9)The procedure suggested in the above quotation cannot be accepted without qualifications, particularly in the case of Lawrence whose "mental attitude towards [himself] and things in general" consistently motivates not only his criticism of other writers but his own practice as a novelist. What he is trying to emphasize is that the writer must not consciously allow his mental attitude to direct his artistic vision, but Lawrence is fully aware that at the unconscious level the artist cannot escape from his own vision of life. In his "Study of Thomas Hardy", Lawrence says : It is the novelists and dramatists who have the hardest task in reconciling their metaphysic, their theory of being and knowing, with their living sense of being. Because a novel is a microcosm, and because man in viewing the universe must view it in the light of a theory, therefore every novel must have the background or the structural skeleton of some theory of being, some metaphysic. But the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic purpose beyond the artist's conscious aim. Otherwise the novel becomes a treatise (P., 479). Let it be clear at the outset that Lawrence is not concerned with the so-called structure of the novel. According to him "all rules of construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels. A book which is not a copy of other books has its own construction" (C.L., I, 399). Neither does he care to deal with the technicalities of style and form. Lawrence insists that " w e judge a work o f art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon" (S.L.C., 118). Lawrence's willingness to allow a novelist his own choice of style and form may be seen in his ready acceptance of such a relatively unconventional form as John Dos Passos uses in Manhattan Transfer. If the " b o o k becomes what life is", the novelist's choice of style and form is amply justified.

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If Lawrence is not concerned with style and form, with what is he concerned? My suggestion is that Lawrence is mainly concerned with the characters, and his theory of the novel is in effect a theory of the presentation of character. What the characters in a novel are and how they behave, these are Lawrence's two basic concerns. Whenever, in his criticism, Lawrence lashes out at Tolstoy or Dostoevsky it is for their failure as novelists to present one or another of their characters truthfully. "In the novel", writes Lawrence, "the characters can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead. A character in a novel has got to live, or it is nothing" (S.L.C., 10607). In order to arrive at what Lawrence himself means by a character who is alive we are perforce led into an examination of his metaphysic, his "theory of being". 3 A short statement of Lawrence's metaphysic is bound to be incomplete. The many versions of his ideas spell confusion largely through his use of a great variety of such terms as the "Holy Ghost", "God the Father", "God the Son", the "Will-to-Motion", the "Will-to-Inertia", the "Axle and the Wheel of Eternity", the ''Old Law", the "New Law", and the "Fourth Dimension", to mention only a few. No scholar has yet successfully waded through all the permutations and combinations of what one critic calls a "plethora of terminology" to arrive at a coherent statement of Lawrence's thought; many have doubted that there is any coherence.13 My own view is that Lawrence's metaphysic spreads out from a centre, as the ripples on a still pond spread from a place where a stone has been dropped, and my job here is not with analyzing the endless ripples that spread outward, but rather with locating the pebble which starts the whole motion. I find it convenient to call my formulation of Lawrence's For a reasonably good attempt at synthesizing Lawrence's ideas, see H. M. Daleski, "The Duality of Lawrence", Modern Fiction Studies, V (Spring, 1959), 3-18. 13

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metaphysic the doctrine of individuality. 1 4 A statement which is basic to grasping this doctrine is the following: A t no moment can man create himself. He can but submit to the creator, to the primal unknown out of which issues the all. A t every moment we issue like a balanced flame from the primal unknown. We are not stlfcontained or self-accomplished. At every moment we derive from the unknown. This is the first and greatest truth of our being. Upon this elemental truth all our knowledge rests. We issue from the primal unknown. Behold my hands and feet, where I end upon the created universe! But who can see the quick, the well-head, where I have egress from the primordial creativity? Yet at every moment, like a flame which burns balanced upon a wick, do I burn in pure and transcendent equilibrium upon the wick of my soul (P., 695-96). Only when man is willing to "submit to the creator" can he hope to achieve what Lawrence elsewhere regards as the "final aim o f every living thing, creature, or being" which is "the full achievement o f itself" (P., 403). N o one can say for certain what the purpose of the "primordial creativity" is, but it "seems as though one of the conditions o f life is, that life shall continually and progressively differentiate itself, almost as though this differentiation were a Purpose" (P., 431). Lawrence explains further: Life starts crude and unspecified, a great Mass. And it proceeds to evolve out of that mass ever more distinct and definite particular forms, an evermultiplying number of separate species and orders, as if it were working always to the production of the infinite number of perfect individuals, the individual so thorough that he should have nothing in common with any other individual (P.,431).15 I have not encountered the phrase "doctrine of individuality" in any of Lawrence's works; it was, however, used by J. S. Mill. See his Autobiography (New York, Columbia University Press, 1948) in which he says: "In our own country, before the book "On Liberty" was written, the doctrine of Individuality had been enthusiastically asserted, in a style of vigorous declamation sometimes reminding one of Fichte, by Mr. William Maccall, in a series of writings of which the most elaborate is entitled Elements of Individualism" (179). For D. H. Lawrence's repeated use of "individuality", see his essay "Love Was Once a Little Boy" in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, 161-89. 15 Also see Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature where he says, "The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself" (£., 66). 14

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In order to be in harmony with the primordial creativity the highest human collectivity must have for its purpose the fullest development of the individual. For Lawrence life and individuality are inseparable. What Lawrence is careful to emphasize, however, is that "though man is first and foremost an individual being, yet the very accomplishing of his individuality rests upon his fulfillment in social life" {P., 613-14). Nor is this all. For the full achievement of the self it is necessary for man to establish vital relationships with "the whole circumambient universe". It is here that the novel can help because it "is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships" (S.L.C., 113). Although the novel is suitable for revealing all living relationships, the "greatest relationship, for humanity, will always be the relation between man and woman" (S.L.C., 112), which consequently becomes of paramount importance in the achievement of individuality. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, where Lawrence explores in great detail the nature of sex, he explains that it is in adolescence that "the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of genuine, responsible solitariness" is experienced. " A child knows the abyss of forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing into his own isolation of individuality" (F., 103). 16 We must remember, says Lawrence, that the "vital sex polarity" between man and woman "rests on otherness" and that no vital relationship between man and woman can ever be established without a recognition of the principle of otherness. Sexual fulfillment, however, by itself cannot lead to the attainment of individuality. "The heart craves for new activity. For new collective activity. That is, for new polarized connection with other beings, other men." According to Lawrence the achievement of individuality finally comes through some kind of creative or purposive activity; but he insists: " Y o u have got to base your great purposive activity upon the intense sexual fulfillment of all your individuals" even though the desire for purposive activity is, in Lawrence's own words, "the greatest desire in men". "When man 18

For a further explanation of the concept of otherness and how it is related to marriage, see F. R . Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London, 1955), 1 1 1 .

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loses his deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and is lost." If a man is to achieve his individuality he "must stand by his own soul, his own responsibility as the creative vanguard of life". It is here that the necessity of obeying one's deepest instincts comes into play, because the goal towards which man must strive cannot be conceived beforehand. " Y o u can't make an idea of the living self: hence it can never become an ideal" (P., 712). The novelist's task is, therefore, "to liberate human beings from the fixed, arbitrary controls of ideals into free spontaneity". In order to find fulfillment it is necessary to yield to one's deepest desires and thereby allow the mysterious life flame to issue from oneself. Lawrence's insistence on the need for collective, purposive activity involves the individual in the establishment of relations with other members of the human community. The difficulty of establishing these relations is complicated by Lawrence's insistence on the spontaneity of feelings, which means in effect leaving each individual free to follow his own emotions. Lawrence, nevertheless, argues: All emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship between a human being and the other human being or creature or thing he becomes purely related to. All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, unestablished balance between two people who amount to anything (S.L.C., 110). The novelist must not falsify his presentation of character by ignoring the existence of certain feelings on the grounds that he may consider these feelings immoral. "If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships", Lawrence contends, "it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships may consist in. If the novelist honours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel" {S.L.C., i l l ) . The novel should present man alive. Only in the novel, Lawrence insists, "are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realise that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living" {S.L.C., 108). The doctrine of individuality requires the free play of instinctive impulses for "out of the full play of all things emerges the only thing that is anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man alive, and live woman" {S.L.C., 108). We must remember that man alive for

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Lawrence is more than man breathing or being merely physically conscious. The man in the novel must be "quick." And this means one thing, among a host of unknown meaning: it means he must have a quick relatedness to all the other things in the novel: snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, toothpaste, lightning, and toilet paper. He must be in quick relation to all these things (R., 111). In looking at Lawrence's metaphysic we have seen that all these relations are the necessary conditions for the achievement of individuality; and the task of the novelist, as Lawrence conceives it, amounts to translating the doctrine of individuality into art.

4 Lawrence's critical response to Tolstoy has to be assembled from various sources, from his letters, essays on literature and other topics, introductions to books, and even his poems, since Lawrence wrote no essay or book specifically about the Russian novelist. The first recorded reference, as we have seen, occurs in a letter to M a y Chambers dated as early as 2 December 1908. Later, on 8 May 1909, in a letter to Blanche Jennings we find Lawrence urging her to read or re-read Anna Karenina and warning Miss Jennings that she "dare not fall out with" the book. In the same letter, Lawrence declares Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment " a tract, a treatise, a pamphlet compared with Tolstoi's Anna Karenina or War and Peace" (C.L., I, 54). Lawrence's early enthusiasm for Tolstoy is clearly evident, but we find no reasons given for this enthusiasm; we do not know what in Tolstoy's work appeals to Lawrence, but from the statement he makes we may infer that he detects little, if any, so-called moralizing in Tolstoy as compared with Dostoevsky. Anna Karenina and War and Peace apparently measure up to Lawrence's criteria for the successful novel. But the criteria by which he judges Tolstoy in 1909 are not those by which he judges Tolstoy later. In 1909 Lawrence asks only whether a novel is "bright, entertaining, convincing" (C.L., I, 5),

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but in later years he demands, as we have seen in formulating Lawrence's theory of the novel, a great deal more. Thus when we come to the "Study of Thomas Hardy", which Lawrence began in 1914 and which is one of the major sources of his criticism of Tolstoy, his attitude toward the Russian novelist is no longer one of unqualified admiration. Nonetheless, when Lawrence speaks of "the wonder of Hardy's novels" which consists in Hardy's presentation of the "vast, unexplored morality of life itself", it is the quality Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare or Sophocles or Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature; setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by the human consciousness within the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself, surpassing human consciousness. The difference is, that whereas in Shakespeare or Sophocles the greater, uncomprehended morality, or fate, is actively transgressed and gives active punishment, in Hardy and Tolstoi the lesser, human morality, the mechanical system is actively transgressed, and holds, and punishes the protagonist, whilst the greater morality is only passively, negatively transgressed, it is represented merely as being present in background, in scenery, not taking any active part, having no direct connexion with the protagonist (P., 419-20). How does this criticism specifically apply to Tolstoy, in terms of his novels? A s we would expect, Lawrence focuses on the behavior of certain characters, in this case on A n n a Karenina and Vronsky. "Their real tragedy", he argues, is that they are unfaithful to the greater unwritten morality, which would have bidden Anna Karenina be patient and wait until she, by virtue of greater right, could take what she needed from society; would have bidden Vronsky detach himself from the system, become an individual [emphasis mine], creating a new colony of morality with Anna {P., 420). Lawrence asks, "what was there in their position that was necessarily tragic?" He does not mean that Anna and Vronsky do not suffer or that their conduct is acceptable to the society in which they live. "Necessarily painful it was", says Lawrence, "but they were not at war with God, only with Society. Y e t they were all cowed by the mere judgment of man upon them, and all the while by their

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own souls they were right. And the judgment of men killed them, not the judgment of their own souls or the judgment of Eternal God" (P., 420). Lawrence's criticism of Tolstoy can, I think, be stated in the following way: According to Lawrence it is the novelist's task to reveal the fundamental truth or reality of human relationships, to dramatize, as it were, those types of relationships which result in the achievement of human individuality and those types of relationships which result in the destruction of individuality. Since the purpose of life is the achievement of individuality or the bringing forth of one's unique quality of life, men and women need not behave in the manner which society expects, for the rules of any society are temporal but laws of life are eternal. Lawrence believes that Tolstoy sides with the claims of society, the claims of "social morality" and not with the claims of the natural or "greater morality". Lawrence is convinced that in his own intrinsic self, Tolstoy recognizes the claim of the higher morality, but as a writer he betrays that vision by taking sides with society against those individuals who are trying to live from their deepest instincts. In Tolstoy's novels as in Hardy's the "average being with average or civic virtues usually succeeds in the end" (P., 438), but the individualist, by which Lawrence means "not a selfish or greedy person, anxious to satisfy appetites, but a man [or woman] of distinct being, who must act in his [or her] own particular way to fulfil his own individual nature" (P., 438-39), is condemned to perish. Thus, the "man who, being beyond the average, chooses to rule his own life to his own completion, and as such is an aristocrat" is never successful in Tolstoy's novels. Like Hardy, says Lawrence, Tolstoy the "artist has a predilection for him" but forces himself "in the issue always to stand with the community in condemnation of the aristocrat". "He cannot help himself", says Lawrence, "but must stand with the average against the exception, he must, in his ultimate judgment, represent the interests of humanity, or the community as a whole, and rule out the individual interest" (P., 439). In trying to account for Tolstoy's failure to present the "greater morality" in his novels, Lawrence inevitably finds himself discussing Tolstoy's "metaphysic" or theory of being. It will be recalled that

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"the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic purpose beyond the artist's conscious aim", otherwise what emerges is not true art. Y o u cannot separate the artist from his work: And the danger is, that a man shall make himself a metaphysic to excuse or cover his own faults or failure. Indeed, a sense of fault or failure is the usual cause of a man's making himself a metaphysic, to justify himself. Then, having made himself a metaphysic of self-justification, or a metaphysic of self-denial, the novelist proceeds to apply the world to this, instead of applying this to the world. Tolstoi is a flagrant example of this. Probably because of profligacy in his youth, because he had disgusted himself in his own flesh, by excess or by prostitution, therefore Tolstoi, in his metaphysic, renounced the flesh altogether, later on, when he had tried and had failed to achieve complete marriage in the flesh. But above all things, Tolstoi was a child of the Law, he belonged to the Father. He had a marvellous sensuous understanding, and very little clarity of mind. So that, in his metaphysic, he had to deny himself, his own being, in order to escape his own disgust of what he had done to himself, and to escape admission of his own failure (P., 479). Lawrence cannot forgive Tolstoy for refusing to devote his powers as a novelist to communicating his "marvellous sensuous understanding". "Reading the reminiscences of Tolstoi", Lawrence recalls, "one can only feel shame at the way Tolstoi denied all that was great in him." " T h a t which was great in him" is Tolstoi's "marvellous sensuous understanding". In Lawrence's personal idiom "Tolstoi denied the Father [i.e. the divinity of the Flesh], and propagated a great system of his recusancy, elaborating his own weakness, blaspheming his own strength" (P., 479). It is a well known fact that Tolstoy considered Anna Karenina and War and Peace not worthy of having been written, but this adverse judgment on his own greatest achievements as a novelist certainly has not been accepted either by literary critics or by the host of Tolstoy's readers. It is a mistake, in my opinion, to see a dramatic change between Tolstoy's ideas at the time he wrote the two great novels and his later ideas. A n d Lawrence is, I think, perceptive enough to see the presence of Tolstoy's denial of the flesh intruding into the clarity of the artistic vision in both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. When Lawrence recalls that Tolstoy was

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wont to say of Anna Karenina, "What difficulty is there in writing about how an officer fell in love with a married woman?", Lawrence is pointing to the moralist betraying the artist. Tolstoy's remark "There's no difficulty in it, and, above all, no good in it", leads Lawrence to retort "there was no difficulty in it because it came naturally to him" since Tolstoy was uttering what was dearest to him, "that law of passion". "The theory of knowledge, the metaphysic of the man", says Lawrence, "is much smaller than the man himself" (P., 481). "The Study of Thomas Hardy" which contains all of the criticism of Tolstoy that we have been examining was started in 1914. Another series of pronouncements on Tolstoy is found in Lawrence's "Introduction" to his translation of Giovanni Verga's Cavalleria Rusticana (1928).17 As in the essay on Hardy, here also Lawrence focuses on Anna Karenina when he thinks of Tolstoy. Although in this essay Lawrence does not argue from the basis of a "greater morality", his criticism of Tolstoy in fact is unchanged, for he once again assails the Russian novelist for denying "the passionate life". Lawrence's criticism of Tolstoy begins with the following pronouncement: This is the tragedy of tragedies in all time, but particularly in our epoch: the killing off of the naive innocent life in all of us, by which alone we can continue to live, and the ugly triumph of the sophisticated greedy

(S.L.C., 286). The charge against Tolstoy is once again that he was by nature a worshipper of true sensuality, but as a novelist he perverted this vision. Lawrence says: Verga turns t o the peasants only to seek for a certain something which, as a healthy artist, he worshipped. Even Tolstoi, as a healthy artist, worshipped it the same. It was only as a moralist and a personal being that Tolstoi was perverse. A s a true artist, he worshipped, as Verga did, every In a letter to Else Jaffe (?25 September 1927), Lawrence writes: "...today I have finished my Cavalleria Rusticana translation: now I've only to do the introduction" (C.L., II, 1004). Lawrence's translation was published as follows: London, Jonathan Cape, March, 1928; New York, Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press, 1928. The "Introduction" is now reprinted in S.L.C., 279-91. 17

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manifestation of pure, spontaneous, passionate life, life kindled to vividness. As a perverse moralist with a sense of some subtle deficiency in himself, Tolstoi tries to insult and to damp out the vividness of life (S.L.C., 287). The reason for Verga's interest in the peasants brings to Lawrence's mind Tolstoy's attitude toward the peasants. "It may be urged", says Lawrence, "that Verga commits the Tolstoian fallacy, of repudiating the educated world and exalting the peasant", but there is a great difference, according to Lawrence, between the attitudes o f Verga and Tolstoy: "Verga is very much the gentleman, exclusively so, to the end of his days. He did not dream of putting on a peasant's smock, or following the plough." In Tolstoy's attitude towards the peasant Lawrence finds another instance of the Russian writer's repudiation of "spontaneous passion". Lawrence makes his charge: What Tolstoi somewhat perversely worshipped in the peasants was poverty itself, and humility, and what Tolstoi perversely hated was instinctive pride or spontaneous passion. Tolstoi has a perverse pleasure in making the later Vronsky abject and pitiable: because Tolstoi so meanly envied the healthy passionate male in the young Vronsky. Tolstoi cut off his own nose to spite his face. He envied the reckless passionate male with a carking envy, because he must have felt himself in some way wanting in comparison. So he exalts the peasant: not because the peasant may be a more natural and spontaneous creature than the city man or the guardsman, but just because the peasant is poverty-striken and humble.' This is malice, the envy of weakness and deformity (S.L.C., 286). Note that even here, when Lawrence thinks of Tolstoy, it is to Anna Karenina that his mind turns; the criticism is still that Tolstoy denies the "passionate male" in himself, a denial which makes him degrade Anna and Vronsky. "Imagine any great artist", explains Lawrence, "making the vulgar social condemnation of A n n a and Vronsky figure as divine punishment!" And Lawrence asks: "where now is the society that turned its back on Vronsky and Anna? Where is it? A n d what is its condemnation worth, to-day?" (S.L.C., 287). Lawrence would, of course, have liked to see Anna and Vronsky triumph over the society which condemned them.

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Tolstoy should have made them even more "quick" than he does, and he should have shown them having brought forth their separate individualities in the face of social convention, since for Lawrence the achievement of individuality is to behave in accordance with "the greater morality". The achievement of individuality is possible only through obedience to "spontaneous passion", and to deny this to Anna and Vronsky is, in Lawrence's view, to slight the universal law of nature and to bolster a society which is dead in its essential roots. Lawrence's criticism of Tolstoy is not, however, restricted to Anna Karenina. Some time before 1925, perhaps in the same year, Lawrence read Tolstoy's novel Resurrection, which was published in 1898. In an essay which Lawrence also called "Resurrection", he tells us: " I have just read, for the first time, Tolstoy's Resurrection" (P., 737). 18 The reading of Tolstoy's novel must have been the motivating force behind Lawrence's essay "The Novel" which appeared in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays (1925). It is significant, I think, that Lawrence's ideas on the novel at this time in his writing career should be worked out against the background of Tolstoy, significant because the fact reveals the powerful attraction which the Russian novelist obviously had for Lawrence. As a document for determining what Lawrence criticizes in Tolstoy, the importance of the essay "The Novel" cannot be overemphasized. Here we have Lawrence's ideas on Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Resurrection, for all three novels are brought into the essay, which may be regarded as the only piece of writing which Lawrence devotes almost entirely to Tolstoy. In this essay Lawrence argues from the position that the critic should try to save the novel

18 This essay was first published posthumously and there is apparently no evidence for the date of its composition. In view of Lawrence's essay "The Novel", published in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays (1925). we can say that "Resurrection" was written prior to 1925. In "Resurrection", D. H. Lawrence does not say anything further about Tolstoy's novel Resurrection except for the quotation I have cited to which Lawrence adds: "His [Tolstoy's] Resurrection [s/c] is the step into the tomb. And the stone rolled upon him" (P., 737).

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from the novelist. As he phrases it in the introductory essay to Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), The artist usually sets out - or used to - to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it (5., 2). Lawrence's confidence in the novel as an art form is firmly stated when he says the "novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo's telescope or somebody else's wireless. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained" (R., 103-04). This recalls his statement from "Why the Novel Matters", published posthumously in Phoenix (1936), in which he says that "being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog" (S.L.C., 105). It is impossible, according to Lawrence, for a novelist to lie, which is what makes the novel such a significant art form; and he goes on to prove his assertion by giving us his own interpretations of Tolstoy's novels. Lawrence again insists that in his own being Tolstoy was a great man, but in his art he perverted his real feelings. Says Lawrence, Tolstoy "worshipped the human male, man as a column of rapacious and living blood. He could hardly meet three lusty, roisterous young guardsmen in the street, without crying with envy: and ten minutes later, fulminating on them black oblivion and annihilation, utmost moral thunder-bolts" (R., 117). And again, "where would any of Leo's books be, without the phallic splendour?" (R., 105). In order to follow the line of Lawrence's argument we must note that this essay on the novel is built around a central image which symbolizes the spontaneous life, the image of the burning flame. When Lawrence thinks of any character in one of Tolstoy's novels, he thinks in terms of the flame image: Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns brighter or dimmer, bluer or yellower or redder, rising or sinking or flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and the changing air of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate flame,

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flickering in a strange world: unless it be blown out at last by too much adversity (A., 116). What the novelist must strive for is to reveal "the flame of a man" struggling to burn freely. It is only men and women who are "quick" that allow the flame to issue from them freely; the "quick", according to Lawrence is the "God-flame, in everything". The novelist cannot afford to be too personal in the creation of his characters; if he is "too personal, too human [Lawrence's italics], the flicker fades out". Lawrence asks and answers the question at the same time: "In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all" (R., 109). How does Lawrence apply these requirements to his reading of the novels of Tolstoy? Let us look first at Anna Karenina. In this novel Tolstoy's didactic purpose, according to Lawrence, is out of harmony with his passional inspiration. It is wrong for Tolstoy to suggest that in seeking sexual fulfillment Anna and Vronsky sin. "Nobody in the world is anything but delighted when Vronsky gets Anna Karenina", says Lawrence, "all the tragedy comes from Vronsky's and Anna's fear of society" (R., 104-05). Despite Tolstoy, Anna Karenina does leave the reader "to learn". Anna and Vronsky sin, but theirs is not a sin in the Tolstoyan sense; instead, Lawrence contends, they sin against "sincere passion", or the God-flame; it is here that they are at fault. "They couldn't live in the pride of their sincere passion", writes Lawrence. Vronsky's character comes in for some rather pointed criticism, but not, let it be clear, Tolstoy's delineation of Vronsky's character. It is obvious that Tolstoy had made his characters come alive in his novels, and Lawrence seems to forget that it was Tolstoy who created Vronsky. As a critic Lawrence often writes about characters as if they were live people who exist outside the novel. In his eagerness to find some characters in Anna Karenina who are bearers of the God-flame, Lawrence at first misreads Vronsky's character. In the "Study of Thomas Hardy", Lawrence regards Vronsky as a passionate male; but in "The Novel", Lawrence gives a more accurate reading of Vronsky. "The novel itself gives Vronsky a kick in the behind", says Lawrence, despite the fact that Tolstoy wrote

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the novel. Lawrence's identification of the basic weakness of Vronsky's character as that of "cowardice" is, in my opinion, an instance of perceptive critical insight : "As an officer I am still useful. But as a man, I am a ruin," says Vronsky - or words to that effect. Well what a skunk, collapsing as a man and a male, and remaining merely as a social instrument... because people at the opera turn backs on him ! (R., 105). Vronsky lacks the courage to bring forth his own individuality, and it is in this lack of courage that he really sins, not in committing adultery with Anna. By the standard set up here, Tolstoy's presentation of Vronsky as "abject and pitiable" at the end of the novel is artistically sound. Let us now turn to Lawrence's criticism of War and Peace. The three characters which are discussed are Prince Andrey, Natasha, and Pierre. It will be recalled that for a character in a novel to be "quick" means to "have a quick relatedness to all the other things in the novel", and on this basis, says Lawrence, "Pierre, for example, in War and Peace, is more dull and less quick than Prince André." Lawrence elaborates : Pierre is quite nicely related to ideas, tooth-paste, God, people, foods, trains, silk-hats, sorrow, diphtheria, stars. But his relation to snow and sunshine, cats, lightning and the phallus, fuchsias and toilet-paper, is sluggish and mussy. He's not quick enough (R., 112). O f course, we are bound to ask Lawrence, whose fault is it that Pierre is not "quick enough"? Y o u can't blame Tolstoy for giving us such a character; the character is true to life. We are justified in recalling Lawrence's own words: "So, if a character in a novel wants two wives - or three - or thirty : well, that is true of that man, at that time, in that circumstance" (R., 114). And Pierre is what he is. Lawrence would not, I think, dispute this point, for this is not really Lawrence's objection to War and Peace. The basic criticism of War and Peace is not that Tolstoy is guilty of creating unreal characters. " O f course Tolstoi", says Lawrence, "being a great creative artist, was true to his characters. But being a

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man with a philosophy, he wasn't true to his own character" (R., 116). Tolstoy's failure to be true to himself produces a distorted vision in the novel. Lawrence says: " A n d War and Peace I call downright dishonourable, with that fat, diluted Pierre for a hero, stuck up as preferable and desirable, when everybody knows that he wasn't attractive, even to Tolstoi" (R., 116). Thus the criticism of War and Peace shifts from the novel to the novelist, and Lawrence denounces Tolstoy: If Tolstoi had looked into the flame of his own belly, he would have seen that he didn't really like the fat, fuzzy Pierre, who was a poor tool, after all. But Tolstoi was a personality even more than a character. And a personality is a self-conscious I am: being all that is left in us of a oncealmighty Personal God. So being a personality and an almighty lam, Leo proceeded deliberately to lionise that Pierre, who was a domestic sort of house-dog (R., 116-17). Lawrence's criticism of War and Peace also extends to Tolstoy's social or religious philosophy, the ideal of Christian brotherhood. Lawrence's antipathy to the commandment " L o v e thy neighbour as thyself" can be easily documented; and his retort "Alas, my neighbour happens to be mean and detestable" is characteristic of his criticism of this Christian injunction. Since it is Pierre in War and Peace who embodies the idea of Christian brotherhood, it is Pierre's character that receives Lawrence's condemnation: Pierre was what we call, "so human". Which means, "so limited." Men clotting together into social masses in order to limit their individual liabilities: this is humanity. And this is Pierre. And this is Tolstoi, the philosopher with a very nauseating Christian-brotherhood idea of himself. Why limit man to a Christian-brotherhood? (R., 112). Of Natasha in War and Peace, Lawrence has little to say. This heroine of Tolstoy's did not have the attraction for Lawrence that A n n a Karenina had. Since in Lawrence's mind Natasha is associated with Pierre, whom she marries, Lawrence tars her with the same brush that he uses on Tolstoy's hero. " O n e can't help feeling", says Lawrence, "Natasha is rather mussy and unfresh, married to that Pierre" (R., 112). When it comes to choosing between Natasha and

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Pierre, and Anna and Vronsky, Lawrence prefers the latter pair of lovers: Better Anna Karenina and Vronsky a thousand times than Natasha and that porpoise of a Pierre. This pretty, slightly sordid couple tried so hard to kid themselves that the porpoise Pierre was puffing with great purpose. Better Vronsky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. Better Vronsky's final statement: "As a soldier I am still some good. As a man I am a ruin" better that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and that beastly peasant blouse the old man wore (F., 191-92). Finally, we must look at Lawrence's criticism of Tolstoy's Resurrection, the reading of which, as I have said, probably motivated the writing of the essay which contains the criticisms of Tolstoy that we have been outlining. According to Lawrence, "the papery lips of Resurrection whisper: " A l a s ! I would have been a novel. But Leo spoiled m e " " (R., 118). As might be expected, Lawrence's criticism of Resurrection is focused on the Prince, Nehludof. And as might be expected "the would-be pious Prince in Resurrection is a muff, with his piety that nobody wants or believes in" (/?., 104). Once again, Lawrence invokes the standard of "the quick", by means of which "that Prince in Resurrection, following the convict girl, we must count dead. The convict train is quick and alive. But that would-beexpiatory Prince is as dead as lumber" (R., 111). Lawrence sees the novel Resurrection as a repudiation of the phallic consciousness, a betrayal of the life-flame. He writes, When that Prince in Resurrection so cruelly betrayed and abandoned the girl, at the beginning of her life, he betrayed and wetted on the flame of his own manhood. When, later, he bullied her with his repentant benevolence, he again betrayed and slobbered upon the flame of his waning manhood, till in the end his manhood is extinct, and he's just a lump of half-alive elderly meat (R., 121). We must admit that the Prince's action is a denial of the sexual self and that he attempts to force himself upon Maslova, not because he really cares what happens to her, but because he feels guilty over his former conduct. The Prince seeks a sort of perverse gratification of his instinct for degradation, hoping thereby to atone for his former

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sensual excesses. Within the all-embracing scope of the novel, the presentation of such a character, even in the leading role, is certainly valid, and this is not where Lawrence's objection lies. Lawrence objects to Tolstoy's apparent sanction of the Prince's behavior. Once again, in his criticism Lawrence refuses to divorce the novelist from the novel; and we cannot refrain from asking, if this is what the Prince was like, why blame Tolstoy. If the characters in every novel were all worthy bearers of the life-flame and all "quick", what would be the relationship between such novels and life? In order to arrive at some kind of a resolution of this dilemma, we must attempt to evaluate Lawrence's criticism of Tolstoy's work. Literary criticism is difficult to evaluate, and Lawrence would himself have been quick to agree. We noted in discussing his theory of the novel that Lawrence was willing to accept only one basis for judging a work of art: "it's effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else". That his own criticism of Tolstoy stems from this critical position has been apparent throughout our discussion of Lawrence's pronouncements on Tolstoy's novels. It has also been apparent that Tolstoy's novels produced a deep and lasting effect on Lawrence's emotions, but how much of this effect is to be attributed to the real nature of Tolstoy's art and how much to the peculiar sensitivity of Lawrence as a reader cannot be easily established. Nonetheless, we may be sure that when any reader sets out to judge a book on the basis of its effect on his emotions that reader is likely to commit errors in his judgment. At the same time, however, the reader's response, particularly if he happens to be D. H. Lawrence, cannot be lightly dismissed. What Lawrence has to say about Tolstoy's novels will always be important, not so much because of what Lawrence says, but because it is Lawrence who says it. Another way in which Lawrence's criticism of Tolstoy is important lies in the fundamental problems that it raises about Tolstoy's artistic intentions in his novels, particularly in Anna Karenina. As we have seen the basic problem is the validity of the poetic justice which Tolstoy metes out to Anna. The question that seems to demand an answer is how did Tolstoy intend the suicide of Anna to be interpreted. Lawrence's argument that her death is a symbolic killing of the essentially healthy human sensual impulses

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is not easy to refute. The fact that Levin and Kitty are shown having established a valid marriage relationship in which there are also children who symbolize the essentially procreative purpose of marriage does not seem sufficient to clear Tolstoy of the charge that in the novel he slights the importance of man's sensual nature. Lawrence claims that "society" killed Anna and that Tolstoy is himself on the side of that "society". Can we accept this criticism? I think not. Just as Lawrence is able to see Vronsky as lacking the courage of his own manhood and yielding to the pressure of society, Lawrence should also see that Anna herself lacks the necessary courage to take from life what is her right. It is not Tolstoy the novelist who denies her the right to find personal fulfillment; it is Anna herself. To be sure there is in Anna's history a certain kind of inevitability or determinism which pushes Anna towards her own destruction. But this inevitability is more the result of Anna's character and her own predilections than it is a result of a morality imposed on the novel by the novelist. Anna Karenina is consistently shown as seeing death as the only alternative to losing Vronsky's love; she does not really want to live, and her suicide is hardly more than an easy way out of her dilemma. Lawrence's misreading of Anna's character, and it is a misreading, is an obvious consequence of the vitality with which Tolstoy endowed her character. Lawrence's own predilection for the woman who has the courage to seek, and to strive for, and to realize her own fulfillment makes him, I think, reluctant to accept her death. It is not, however, Tolstoy's fault that she dies; and perhaps Tolstoy himself is loath to have her die, for as one critic has noted, despite her horrible death, Anna's head remains untouched. What Tolstoy has created in Anna is really the kind of sensual vitality which Lawrence so much worshipped and Lawrence is unwilling to have this vitality destroyed. Yet it is precisely here that the tragedy of Anna lies; this woman endowed with so much life has not the courage to live. Raymond Williams says that Lawrence the critic of Tolstoy was sometimes put right by Lawrence the novelist, and this is an example of perceptive critical insight, indeed. Lawrence's response to Tolstoy has its artistic dimension as well. The number of

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parallels between Anna Karenina and Lawrence's own novels and short stories is extensive. If we think of Lawrence's heroines, we can see that in some measure they are, all of them, Anna Kareninas who have had the courage to pursue their own fulfillments, who, unlike Anna, choose life instead of death. Connie Chatterley immediately comes to mind, because like Anna she is married to a man with whom she cannot find fulfillment, and seeks fulfillment in adultery. But it would be a mistake to look always for a context of adultery, since Lawrence's heroines have little regard for the outward form of marriage; married or unmarried they seek the man with whom they can find sexual fulfillment. Thus, it seems to me, the most instructive novel, in terms of Lawrence's artistic response to Tolstoy, is The Rainbow, an examination of which I shall now attempt.

5 In looking at The Rainbow as an instance of Lawrence's artistic response to his reading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, I am not prepared to go quite as far as Raymond Williams does when he says, "The terms in which he [Lawrence] describes how Anna and Vronsky ought to have acted are virtually a description of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and this novel can be seen as a conscious answer to Anna Karenina."19 Although I would hardly call The Rainbow Lawrence's "conscious answer" to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, there are I believe cogent reasons for seeking in The Rainbow, in terms of Lawrence's art, answers to the objections or criticisms which Lawrence as a critic levels at Anna Karenina. There is, in addition, circumstantial evidence to connect Lawrence's writing of The Rainbow with his reading of Anna Karenina. At the very time that Lawrence's novel was taking shape in his mind, Frieda, to whom he was not yet married but with whom he was then living, was reading Anna Karenina and trying to apply the novel to Lawrence's and her own situation.20 It is, therefore, probable that Lawrence re-read Raymond Williams, "Tolstoy, Lawrence and Tragedy", Kenyon Review, X X V (Autumn, 1963), 636. 20 In a letter to Edward Garnett (?5 November 1912) Lawrence writes: " F . [Frieda] had carefully studied Anna Karenina, in a sort of "How to be happy 19

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sections of Tolstoy's novel with Frieda at a very crucial time in the creation of The Rainbow. It would not be surprising to find echoes of Anna Karenina in The Rainbow, and echoes there certainly are. Lawrence's rich evocation of the countryside in the early chapters of The Rainbow, for example, recalls Tolstoy's account of life on Levin's country estate; the family of Brangwen girls recalls that of the Shtcherbatskys; and in Anna Brangwen's absorption in her procreative functions we can easily see resemblances to Tolstoy's Dolly. It would not be difficult to find numerous examples of this kind, but such echoes or parallels are difficult to prove; in other words, we cannot say with certainty that there is a causal link between any pair of resemblances. Nor do I intend to devote more discussion to searching for such parallels; instead, I want to focus on two characters in The Rainbow, Ursula Brangwen and Anton Skrebensky, and to show how these characters may be seen as creative extensions and corrections by Lawrence of Tolstoy's artistic vision. I said earlier that Lawrence was loath to have Anna Karenina die, for in her there is much of the quickness of instinctual life which he so worshipped. I wish now to argue that in creating Ursula Brangwen, Lawrence in effect extends Tolstoy's artistic vision by showing that a woman such as Anna Karenina need not perish in her search for personal fulfillment and the achievement of individuality. We have noted that according to Williams "Anna's tragedy is that she leaves one inadequate man for another", and we have seen that Lawrence condemns Vronsky for "collapsing as a man and a male, and remaining merely as a social instrument". It is significant that in her search for fulfillment or in her journey towards the achievement of individuality Ursula Brangwen finds herself up against a man almost exactly like Vronsky, who is "an officer" in the army and whose very name, Skrebensky, echoes that of Anna Karenina's lover. Like Vronsky, Skrebensky arouses passion in a though livanted" spirit. She finds Anna very much like herself, only inferior Vronsky is not much like me - too much my superior" (C.L., I, 154). A t the time Lawrence was still at work on Sons and Lovers, but in a letter to Garnett (18 April 1913), Lawrence writes: " I have written 180 pages of my newest novel The Sisters [The Rainbow and Women in Love]" (C.L., I, 200).

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woman but is unable finally to sustain this passion, and, to use Lawrence's words collapses "as a man and a male". Unlike Anna Karenina, Ursula Brangwen does not cease her quest simply because her lover leaves her unsatisfied. Tolstoy's heroine, it must have seemed to Lawrence, takes the cowardly way out, and she might have learned from Lawrence's heroine the necessity to reject the man who has nothing at his centre, who possesses no measure of individuality. Ursula Brangwen comes finally to the realization that she cannot create her own man: "It was not for her to create, but to recognize a man created by God. The man should come from the Infinite and she should hail him. She was glad she could not create her man." 21 Whereas Anna Karenina gives in to despair and chooses suicide, Ursula Brangwen has the courage to stand by her integral self. There is another way in which Lawrence's creation of Ursula may be seen as an extension or correction of Tolstoy's creation of Anna. Generously endowed with life as Anna may be, there is in Tolstoy's conception of her character a peculiar sort of unreality. She is a woman, it seems, without a palpable past in that we know virtually nothing of her childhood and very little of her girlhood. As Tolstoy presents her, Anna does not seem to exist apart from her passion for Vronsky. The Russian critic Dmitri Merezhkovsky puts it this way: W h o or what is she, apart from love? W e only know that she is a St. Petersburg woman in high society. But, apart from her rank, where do the roots o f her being find their way into the soil of Russia? For that being is deep and primitive enough to have such roots. What does she think about in general, about children, people, Duty, Nature, Art, Life, Death, and G o d ? On this we know nothing, or almost nothing. 2 2

21 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Phoenix edition; London, William Heinemann Limited, 1955), 493. All subsequent references to The Rainbow are to this edition. 22 Dmitri Merejkowski, Tolstoi as Man and Artist [with an essay on Dostoievsky, (Westminster, Archibald Constable and Co. Ltd., 1902), 216-17. No record is given of the translator. There is a surprising similarity between some of the comments about Tolstoy which Merejkowski makes and those made by Lawrence. I have not, however, been able to determine whether Lawrence read Merejkowski's book. The book was available in English translation as early as 1902 and therefore Lawrence might have read it.

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Y e t Anna Karenina, even in Lawrence's sense of the word, comes "alive" in the novel, perhaps more than any other character, and leaves a vivid impression on the reader. How does Tolstoy create this effect? Merezhkovsky points out that although we know so little about Anna's cultural roots, we know a great deal about her physical body: ...we know exactly how her curls wave and flutter on her neck and temples, how her slender fingers taper at the end, and what a round, firm, polished neck she has; every expression of her face, every movement of her body we know. Her body, where it touches the primitive animal point, soul - her nightly soul - we see with startling distinctness.23 If Merezhkovsky is correct, and I see no reason for disagreeing with his observation, we can readily understand why Lawrence was attracted by Tolstoy's creation of Anna Karenina for in her creation, if anywhere, we have an instance of that "marvellous sensuous understanding" which Lawrence recognizes as the true greatness of Tolstoy as a writer. Let us now try to see how Lawrence's conception of Ursula Brangwen is an extension of Anna Karenina. Unlike Anna, Ursula does not turn up in the novel, as it were, fully grown. Our first glimpse of Anna, it will be recalled, is on the train which brings her and Vronsky's mother to Moscow, and it is from the time of Anna's meeting with Vronsky that her story is developed. If in Tolstoy's creation of Anna Karenina we see the "quick" woman in full bloom, in Lawrence's creation of Ursula we see the seeds and roots of that "quickness"; more than that, in Lawrence's delineation of Ursula, we witness the struggle of such "quickness" coming into being. Ursula Brangwen's past becomes as palpable within the scope of The Rainbow as does her present. The roots of this past are firmly set in the two preceding generations of Brangwens whose history occupies the first half of Lawrence's novel. When we think of Ursula, we are able to recall her grandfather, Tom Brangwen, and how he married Lydia Lensky. We can recall Ursula's mother as the strange little child that Lydia Lensky brings with her from her former marriage to a Polish idealist. We 23

Dmitri Merejkowski, Tolstoi as Man and Artist, 217.

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are present at Ursula's birth; we witness her childhood anguish. And because The Rainbow is in a very real sense a bildungsroman, the girlhood and education of Ursula are also an integral part of Lawrence's novel. 24 As we read The Rainbow, there is no need to puzzle what Ursula thinks about "children, people, Duty, Nature, Art, Life, Death, and God". We see very clearly where "the roots of her being find their way into the soil o f " England. The course of Ursula's development is charted by Lawrence in great detail. We learn about Ursula's childhood and girlhood, but what is probably more significant is that we can follow her step by step as she hammers out for herself an enduring faith in the form of a belief in the doctrine of individuality. Ursula's struggle with Christianity, the religion which is already shown to be ineffectual in providing a raison d'être for her mother, is presented by Lawrence as a convincing struggle which the young woman wages as she gropes for some sort of enduring principle by which to live. Added to Ursula's struggle with religion is her struggle with society, that great leveller of individuality, the society over which Ursula must triumph if she is to achieve her personal fulfillment. In the chapter which Lawrence entitles "The Man's World", Ursula does triumph in her role of schoolmistress and emerges as the woman who has truly earned the right to be herself. Thus in Ursula's attempt to establish a vital relationship with Skrebensky we see the behavior of a woman whose character has been firmly established within the context of the novel; she is no mere "body" lacking a spiritual identity, but a woman whose spiritual resilience has often been put to the test. We are, therefore, prepared for the struggle between Ursula and Skrebensky, knowing full well that Ursula will accept nothing short of genuine fulfillment. Her rejection of Skrebensky, when he proves himself incapable of sustaining her passion, is not only consistent with Ursula's character but becomes yet another instance of her courage to attain that fulfillment which she so passionately desires. Nor is Ursula's 24 See Edward Engelberg, "Escape from the Circles of Experience: D . H. Lawrence's The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman", PMLA, LXXVIII (March, 1963), 103-13.

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struggle with Skrebensky easy in comparison with Anna Karenina's struggle with Vronsky. That Lawrence anticipates this possible criticism of his heroine and provides the basis for its refutation is clear in the following quotation from the closing pages of The Rainbow: There would be no child: she was glad. If there had been a child, it would have made little difference, however. She would have kept the child and herself, she would not have gone to Skrebensky. Anton belonged to the past (Rainbow, 493). Married she may not be, but even if she were, the tenacity with which she carries on the struggle would still be the same for Ursula. If we are willing to accept Ursula as the character through whom Lawrence extends Tolstoy's conception of Anna, we can see that at the end of The Rainbow Ursula's relationship with Skrebensky has reached the same kind of impasse as Anna Karenina's relationship with Vronsky. The worlds of both women are about to collapse when Anna and Ursula realize the futility of any further involvement with the men whom they have formerly regarded as being capable of bringing about their personal fulfillment. Despite this similarity in the positions of the two women, there is a great difference in the eventual solutions which Anna and Ursula adopt. Tolstoy's herione can see no alternative to a life without Vronsky except death; but Ursula manages to learn from her experience with Skrebensky, and there appears to her at the end of the novel that vision of the rainbow which is symbolic of hope for the future. A s a "man and a male" Skrebensky is very much like Vronsky. A n d it is a question whether Tolstoy makes Vronsky more "abject and pitiable" or whether these words apply equally to Lawrence's own treatment of Skrebensky. Certainly it is difficult to conceive a more abject "man and male" than Skrebensky when he is told by Ursula: " I don't think I want to be married." Here is Lawrence's description of Skrebensky's reaction: His drawn, strangled face watched her blankly for a few moments, then a strange sound took place in his throat. She started, came to herself, and, horrified, saw him. His head made a queer motion, the chin jerked back against the throat, the curious, crowing, hiccupping sound came again,

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his face twisted like insanity, and he was crying, crying blind and twisted as if something were broken which kept him in control (Rainbow, 446-67). Ursula tries desperately to stop Skrebensky's crying: But he was crying uncontrollably, noiselessly, with his face twisted like a mask, contorted and the tears running down the amazing grooves in his cheeks. Blindly, his face always this horrible working mask, he groped for his hat, for his way down from the terrace (Rainbow, 467). The last glimpse of Vronsky which Tolstoy gives us shows him on the way to the Serbian War, accompanied by his mother who blames Anna Karenina for her son's misery. The Countess Vronsky begs Sergey Ivanovitch to speak to Vronsky: " D o please talk to him a little. I want to distract his mind. He's so low-spirited. And as bad luck would have it, he has toothache too." 2 5 Vronsky is, of course, not interested in seeing anyone; he is bent on meeting death and " t o meet death one needs no letters of introduction" (Anna Karenina, 926). He wants only to be rid of life; the Serbian cause has no meaning for him. " H e could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong teeth, that were like rows of ivory in his mouth", Tolstoy informs us. A s Vronsky looks on "the wheels of the tender, slowly and smoothly rolling along the rails", his thoughts turn to his Anna, to her appearance in death, to the time of their first meeting. Tolstoy says: He tried to recall his best moments with her, but those moments were poisoned forever. He could only think of her as triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse never to be effaced. He lost all consciousness of toothache, and his face worked with sobs (Anna Karenina, 927). Neither Vronsky nor Skrebensky appears admirable in the end. Vronsky goes to a certain death; Skrebensky decides to marry the Colonel's daughter, "quickly, without hesitation, pursued by his obsession for activity", and in a week's time sails "with his new wife to India" {Rainbow, 482). Within the scope of The Rainbow, Ursula 25 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett (2 vols.; New York, Random House, 1939), II, 924-25. Subsequent references to Anna Karenina are to this edition.

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does not meet the man with whom she will find fulfillment, and Skrebensky's function is really negative, since he symbolizes the type of man who is anything but "quick". We can, therefore, throw Lawrence's charge against Tolstoy's creation of Vronsky as an abject example of mankind back at Lawrence for his own creation of Skrebensky in the same image. As a critic Lawrence often seems to forget that a novel cannot be made up entirely of individuals who are quick, but as a novelist, an artist himself, Lawrence very well recognizes the need for contrast and the fact that characters such as Vronsky and Skrebensky do have a place in art. Lawrence the literary artist is invariably superior to Lawrence the literary critic. One more observation about The Rainbow must be made before I bring this chapter to a close. If we regard Lawrence's novel as an instance of his artistic response to his reading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and accept Ursula Brangwen as an extension of Anna, we must also realize that the extension proceeds in two directions. In The Rainbow, Lawrence's reshaping of Tolstoy's heroine is extended backward as we are shown the continuous development of Ursula's character; in other words, Lawrence may be said to be making up in his creation of Ursula that background which Tolstoy's Anna Karenina lacks. In presenting Ursula's relationship with Skrebensky, Lawrence's novel provides a parallel to Tolstoy's treatment of the relationship between Anna and Vronsky. In both of these relationships, as we have seen, the action builds up to a climax, and Ursula and Anna each arrive at a crisis which contains the potentiality of death. It is Ursula Brangwen who says in her letter to Skrebensky, "Truly the best thing would be for me to die, and cover my fantasies for ever" (Rainbow, 484). Yet it is Anna Karenina who chooses death, and it is Ursula Brangwen who chooses life. In Lawrence's novel thus Ursula's life begins at the very point at which, in Tolstoy's novel, Anna's life ends. Within the scope of The Rainbow, however, Lawrence's forward extension of Tolstoy's conception of Anna in terms of Ursula's character does not take place; but Lawrence's reputation as a novelist would not be so high, nor his response to his reading of Tolstoy so noteworthy, if Lawrence had proceeded no further with the development of Ursula's char-

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acter. As is very well known, Lawrence wrote a sequel to The Rainbow in his novel Women in Love, and it is in the latter novel that Lawrence extends Tolstoy's vision of Anna Karenina forward as he shows Ursula's career from the time of her rejection of Skrebensky to the time of her marriage to Birkin. There are, therefore, good reasons also for regarding Women in Love in terms of Lawrence's artistic response to his reading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Within the scope of this study, however, I cannot undertake such a reading of Women in Love, the complexity of which would require an extension of our study beyond those limits which I have placed upon it. My discussion of The Rainbow has, I think, demonstrated sufficiently the truth of the thesis that there is, in addition to a purely critical dimension in Lawrence's response to his reading of Tolstoy, an artistic dimension as well which extends to Lawrence's own efforts as a creative writer. Once having established this thesis, there are no limits to the ways in which this thesis may be applied to Lawrence's works. Whether we turn to a story such as St. Mawr or to a novel such as Lady Chatterle/s Lover, an examination of the work in terms of Lawrence's artistic response to Tolstoy will always be illuminating.

IV

D. H. L A W R E N C E A N D T H E D O S T O E V S K Y C U L T

Despite the fact that Dostoevsky (1821-1881) died nearly twenty years before the beginning of the twentieth century, his works in English translation must be regarded as a twentieth century phenomenon. The Brothers Karamazov was published in Russian in 1880, but it was not until the appearance of Constance Garnett's translation in 1912 that Dostoevsky began to be read with any real interest in England. Such was the enthusiasm generated by the appearance of The Brothers Karamazov that critics who write about Dostoevsky's impact on English readers invariably refer to the "Dostoevsky cult", which immediately sprang up and which counted among its initiates many of D. H. Lawrence's contemporaries.1 In his study of The Russian Novel in English Fiction (London, 1956), Gilbert Phelps has tried to provide an explanation for the "suddenness of the flare-up" of enthusiasm for the work of Dostoevsky at the beginning of the twentieth-century in England. Phelps argues that Among the writers who refer to the "Dostoevsky cult" are Dmitri Mirsky, Helen Muchnic, and Gilbert Phelps. Mirsky, for example, says: "The cult of Dostoievsky began in Great Britain among the intelligentsia during the war. It was a cult which corresponded to the poems of Wilfred Owen. But it was more than the worship of suffering that attracted in Dostoievsky. Now that the hopes of the nineteenhundreds had come down to the catastrophe of the war, the incomparably mystical, exaggerated irrational cult of faith in Dostoievsky was just what was needed to replace the rarified naturalistically rationalistic faith of Shaw. Faith in vital forces disappeared, and a faith in the miraculous appeared" {The Intelligentsia of Great Britain, translated by Alec Brown [New York, Covici Friede Publishers, 1935], 107-08). 1

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the various forces and tendencies, social, economic, philosophical and aesthetic, that we have seen gradually accumulating throughout the nineteenth century, had suddenly increased their pressure, and reached a point at which some event or another was bound, in Thomas Seccombe's phrase, to open the floodgates.2 Thus the Dostoevsky cult symbolizes " a powerful liberation of emotions that had been held in check by nineteenth-century Rationalism, and by over-rigid aesthetic theories". 3 We cannot take time here to trace in its entirety Phelps's argument which, it seems to me, is almost too pat an explanation for the kind of phenomenon in literary history which cannot be finally accounted for and the basis for which is largely the critic's individual interpretation of events rather than objective evidence. Helen Muchnic, for example, who has studied the vicissitudes of "Dostoevsky's English Reputation (1881-1936)" finds quite different reasons for the sudden emergence of the Dostoevsky cult: That the period of Dostoevsky's greatest popularity should have coincided with the World War is partly but not entirely due to accident. It so happened that the best translation of his work appeared between 1912 and 1921 so that only then was the way opened to a real appreciation. Furthermore, wartime propaganda in favor of Russia must be held in a large part accountable. But these circumstances do not explain tfte rhapsodies with which Dostoevsky was then received. The World War had intensified rather than changed the dominant ways of thought of the years immediately preceding, and the Dostoevsky cult embodied the heightened nationalism and individualism of an earlier period. It was a complex intellectual phenomenon, composed partly of war-time sympathies, partly of mysticism, partly of a new interest in abnormal psychology and in the revelations of psychoanalysis, partly of an absorbed concern with artistic experimentation. Dostoevsky represented an ally, a mystic, a psychologist of the unconscious, a designer of a new fictional form.4 Whether the Dostoevsky cult is, to use Phelps's own words, "the 2 Gilbert Phelps, The Russian Novel in English Fiction (London, Hutchinson's University Library, 1956), 170-71. 8 Gilbert Phelps, op. cit., 1 7 1 . 4 Helen Muchnic, Dostoevsky's English Reputation, 1881-1936 ("Smith College Studies in Modern Languages", X X [Northampton, Mass., April and July,

1939]). 5-6.

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last flare-up of Romantic decadence", 5 and the result of "the hectic atmosphere of the war, with its secret guilts and fears" ;6 or whether English readers were suddenly drawn to Dostoevsky for the numerous reasons cited by Muchnic are explanations which cannot be objectively evaluated. In any case, the question of whether Phelps or Muchnic is more correct is really not of importance in this study. What is important here is to be able to reconstruct or to grasp the mood of those English readers of Dostoevsky who shared a common enthusiasm for his works. Fortunately, for our purpose, a number of Lawrence's contemporaries have left vivid accounts of the "experience" which their reading of Dostoevsky represented; and it is by examining these accounts that we can best recapture, as it were, the essence of what Helen Muchnic calls "the rhapsodies with which Dostoevsky was then received". Perhaps it is not superfluous to point out that, as is the case with any great artist, Dostoevsky was bound to elicit a variety of reactions from his readers depending on the individual predilections of those readers. What appealed to some of Dostoevsky's English readers must certainly have repelled others; what some readers regarded as his major artistic strengths others, understandably so, looked upon as evidence of artistic ineptitude. As we attempt to describe D. H. Lawrence's response to Dostoevsky we must constantly keep in mind that Lawrence was not merely a reader who came to Dostoevsky for an "experience" but a creative writer rapidly emerging as a novelist in his own right. That the Dostoevsky cult "died away almost as quickly as it had come" 7 tends to confirm the fact that the most enthusiastic admirers of Dostoevsky were impressed by emotional considerations rather than by an underlying universality of meaning which they discerned in his work. Our first step in this portion of our study will be to bring together the responses to Dostoevsky of a number of Lawrence's contemporaries in an attempt to point up the contrast which Lawrence's own attitude represents. I have selected Edward Garnett, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Katherine Mansfield, and John 5 4 7

Gilbert Phelps, op. tit., 171. Gilbert Phelps, op. cit., 172. Gilbert Phelps, op. cit. ,173.

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Middleton Murry as writers and critics who belonged to the Dostoevsky cult and whose enthusiasm for this Russian was certainly known to Lawrence. Once we have seen how this group of English readers felt about Dostoevsky, we will go on to Lawrence's criticism of the Russian novelist, and our chapter will end with an attempt to describe in terms of Lawrence's own art his response to Dostoevsky.

1 It is useful to look first at Edward Gamett's attitude towards Dostoevsky because of the close relationship which existed between Lawrence and the Garnetts. Constance Garnett was responsible for several translations of Dostoevsky into English, and Lawrence was, of course, aware of these translation activities. From Lawrence's letters we learn that Mrs. Garnett spent some time with Lawrence and Frieda on the continent; and we learn also that Lawrence was aware of Edward Garnett's plan to write a book on Dostoevsky, a plan which apparently did not materialize. Nonetheless, Edward Garnett's enthusiasm for Dostoevsky can be easily seen if we look at the introduction which Garnett wrote to the Everyman edition of The Brothers Karamazov (1927): But exhaustive and indeed distressingly diffuse as is Dostoevsky's literary method, it holds one helpless in its clutch, so amazing in intensity and force is his creative genius. Immersed in this book one has the sensation of being carried along in a turbulent flood, engulfed in whirlpools of passionate feeling, whirled along in rapids of thought, caught up and held fast in fresh currents of mystical speculation. And the atmospheric pressure increases till the climax is reached. The Brothers Karamazov is both a great work of art and a great treasure-house of national psychical pathology.8 If we consider the feeling described in the above quotation, it is impossible to agree with Frank Swinnerton who says that " f o r Edward Garnett Turgenev remained the ideal novelist. For the glorious but occasionally shoddy thrillingness of Dostoevsky he 8 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett, introduction by Edward Garnett (2 vols., Everyman Library, 1957), v-vi.

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had no enthusiasm." 9 I think that Edward Garnett must have shared the prevailing admiration for Dostoevsky; if after nearly twenty years he could express his feelings for The Brothers Karamazov in the manner which the quotation I have given reveals, we may be certain that in 1912 Garnett's enthusiasm must have been much less restrained. In the numerous meetings between Lawrence and Garnett discussions of Dostoevsky's merits must certainly have taken place. N o r is Edward Garnett alone in describing his reading of Dostoevsky as an experience of being gripped by forces against his own will. Virginia Woolf, who also greatly admired Russian literature, and whose own novels were undoubtedly shaped by her reading of the Russians, uses language very similar to that used by Garnett to describe the feelings aroused in her during a reading of Dostoevsky. In her essay "The Russian Point of View", Virginia Woolf writes: The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, water-spouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. These are composed purely and wholly out of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture.10 Her admiration for Dostoevsky is exceeded only by her veneration of Tolstoy. For her, "there still remains the greatest of all novelists - for what else can we call the author of War and Peace?" Her reading of the Russians affected her deeply; writing her essay " M o d e r n Fiction", she says: 9 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, 1910-1935 (New York, Farrar, Straus and Company, Inc., n. d.), 194. Swinnerton himself gives the following description of the effect of Dostoevsky's novels on English readers: " A s for Dostoevsky's novels, they had power and subtlety, emotion and picturesqueness, altogether outside the range of any English novelists whatsoever... How pale Turgenev seemed! How material and common in grain our own realistic writers! How drab our life of restrained feelings! From Russia came release. Possibly a little incoherence? Come, come, come! 'Life is real, and life is earnest!' To the serious, every Continental master is or should be sacred" (230-31).

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (First and Second Series Combined in One Volume; New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1948), 250.

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The most elementary remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian influence, and if the Russians are mentioned one runs the risk of feeling that to write of any fiction save theirs is waste of time. If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human spirit... In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the suffering of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery. 11 In another essay " T h e A r t o f F i c t i o n " , Virginia W o o l f draws the following contrast between the Russian and English novelists: In England at any rate the novel is not a work of art. There are none to be stood beside War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, or A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. But while we accept the fact, we cannot suppress one last conjecture. In France and Russia they take fiction seriously. Flaubert spends a month seeking a phrase to describe a cabbage. Tolstoy writes War and Peace seven times over. 12 Virginia W o o l f ' s connection with S. S. Koteliansky places her within the Lawrence circle, and her admiration for the Russians w o u l d certainly have been communicated to Lawrence. T h u s in the face o f such reverence for the Russians as Virginia

Woolf's,

Lawrence's response is doubly significant. Lawrence could not have escaped the enthusiasm which translations o f the Russians generated, and w e have already cited evidence that he was himself strongly attracted to the w o r k o f these Russians. Bernard Blackstone says o f Virginia W o o l f that the factors w h i c h "affected her more perhaps than they have other novelists" were " t h e Russian novel; the w a r ; the g r o w t h o f fascism; the feminist m o v e m e n t ; the friendships in L o n d o n and C a m b r i d g e " . 1 3 T h e consideration o f Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 216-17. Virginia Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1948), 111-12. 18 Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1949), 9.

11

12

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whether a similar place can be assigned to the Russian novel in the development of D. H. Lawrence will have to be postponed until the conclusion of this study. Another novelist, also Lawrence's contemporary, whose response to Dostoevsky and to the other Russians was as pronounced as that of Virginia Woolf was Arnold Bennett. Although Lawrence had little personal contact with Bennett, it is useful to see how different the attitude of these two writers was to the works of Dostoevsky. Lawrence was, after all, working very hard to establish his own reputation as a novelist, and the approval of someone like Bennett would have been valuable to strengthen Lawrence's position or at least to give him a sense of accomplishment. Lawrence's letters, however, reveal that Lawrence resented Bennett's low opinion of his work, but nevertheless kept his self-confidence. Commenting on Bennett and others who had criticized his work, Lawrence says, "I shall repeat till I am grey - when they have as good a work to show, they may make their pronouncements ex cathedra. Till then, let them learn decent respect" (C.L., I, 399). No doubt Lawrence saw in Bennett a rival novelist and was piqued by Bennett's popular success and his patronizing attitude. At the height of the Dostoevsky craze, Bennett was a leading spokesman for the work of the Russian novelist, at the very time, we should note, when Lawrence was hoping to distinguish himself as a major English novelist. In retrospect, we may say that at least some of the praise that Bennett lavished on the Russians might justifiably have been given to Lawrence. What does Bennett say about Dostoevsky? Gilbert Phelps argues that "although Tolstoy and later Dostoevsky and Chekhov challenged Turgenev for the first place in his favour, in matters of pure technique Turgenev remained the model" 14 for Bennett. Nonetheless, Bennett's enthusiasm for Dostoevsky was every whit as unrestrained as that of the other members of the cult. As a matter of fact, Bennett first read Dostoevsky in French translation, several years before the publication of The Brothers Karamazov in English. In 1910 he wrote:

14

Gilbert Phelps, The Russian Novel in English Fiction, 111.

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I thought I had read all the chief works of the five great Russian novelists, but last year I came across one of Dostoevsky's, "The Brothers Karamazov," of which I had not heard. It was a French translation, in two thick volumes. I thought it contained some of the greatest scenes that I had ever encountered in fiction, and I at once classed it with Stendhal's "Chartreuse de Parme" and Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" as one of the supreme marvels of the world. 15 In the account from which I have just quoted, there are several more examples of very high praise for Dostoevsky. Referring to "the scene with the old monk at the beginning of The Brothers

Karama-

zov", Bennett maintains that "there is nothing in either English or French prose literature to hold a candle to it". He hastens to exclaim, " A n d I d o not exaggerate!" "These pages are", he says, "unique. They reach the highest and most terrible pathos that the novelist's art has ever reached." 1 6 In fairness, I should note that Bennett does not give Dostoevsky unqualified approval as an artist; all his works " h a v e great faults", faults which both Turgenev and Flaubert avoid. A f t e r The Brothers

Karamazov

was translated into English in

1912, Bennett was even more laudatory towards D o s t o e v s k y : Twenty-five years ago, in discussing the chief Russian novelists, I would have begun with Turgenev; but in those days Dostoievsky had not been adequately or even decently translated. Now, whenever my mind dwells on the greatest achievements in fiction I think, before any other novel, of The Brothers Karamazov. I read this first in French, and though the translation was mediocre in quality and most grossly mutilated, I came immediately to a very definite conclusion about the book. I had never met with anything so vast and comprehensive in scale, so consistently powerful, so profound, so beautiful, so tragic, so moral, so philosophical in intention and execution, so convincing, so enthralling. Later, I read it twice in the complete English translation, and my estimate of it was therefore only raised. 17

Arnold Bennett, Books and Persons (London, Chatto and Windus, 1920), 151. 16 Arnold Bennett, op. cit., 151. 17 Arnold Bennett, The Savour of Life: Essays in Gusto (New York, Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc., 1928), 130-31. 18

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Bennett's unqualified appraisal of The Brothers Karamazov was that it was the greatest novel yet written. "Shakespeare stands alone", of course, he concedes, but " I implacably affirm that a greater novel (in our modern sense of the word "novel") than The Brothers Karamazov has yet to be written". 1 8 Because our discussion of Lawrence's criticism of Dostoevsky will extend beyond The Brothers Karamazov, I want to record here Bennett's reaction to the other major novels of Dostoevsky. " I rate The Idiot", he says, "little lower than The Brothers. The Idiot is lovely; its closing pages are the summit of simple majesty." The House of the Dead is a "still lovelier b o o k " , and even if we deny that it is a novel, it is nevertheless "the most celestial restorative of damaged faith in human nature that any artist ever produced", for the book is the "most successful and touching demonstration of the truth that man is not vile". A s for Crime and Punishment, it is certainly to be ranked among the dozen best novels in the world. O f The Possessed or Letters from the Underworld, Bennett says nothing. A s for Dostoevsky himself, The objectors to Dostoievsky say that he was an epileptic. Well, he was. And what of it? They say also that he was morbid. This I deny. He was an imperfect person; he made a mess of his life; he suffered terrible trials; he was continually hard up for a hundred roubles. But none of these things made him morbid; his outlook upon the world was always sane, undistorted, and kindly. He loved men.19 When we come to Lawrence's criticism of Dostoevsky, as man and artist, we shall see how different it is. Two more English readers of Dostoevsky whose attitudes I wish to examine are Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. The opinions of these two are particularly important because of the intimacy which existed between them and Lawrence. In his Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence, Murry has left a record of the opposition which their interpretations of Dostoevsky generated, and when we come to our survey of Lawrence's criticism of Dostoevsky I will try to clarify the basis for the opposed points of view held by Lawrence 18 19

Arnold Bennett, op. cit., 131. Arnold Bennett, op. cit., 132.

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and Murry. For the present I want to illustrate the nature of the emotional responses of Katherine Mansfield and Murry. A m o n g the Russians it was Chekhov who meant most to Katherine Mansfield, but she was also profoundly affected by her reading of Dostoevsky. In several notes published from her Journal we see evidence of her reading of Dostoevsky. There are notes on J'he Idiot and The Possessed; of the latter she writes: There is something awfully significant about the attitude of Shatov to his wife, and it is amazing how, when Dostoevsky at last turns a soft but penetrating and full light upon him, how we have managed to gather a great deal of knowledge of his character from the former vague sidelights and shadowy impressions.20 A little later we read: " H o w did Dostoevsky know about that extraordinary vindictive feeling, that relish for little laughter - that comes over women in pain? It is a very secret thing, but it's profound, profound." 2 1 These are isolated comments to be sure, but even in them the tell-tale signs of veneration for Dostoevsky are evident; the reading of Dostoevsky is an "experience". When we come to Murry's attitude towards Dostoevsky, the enthusiasm of all other readers pales in comparison, for in Murry, Dostoevsky's works find the kind of appreciative reader that a novelist even in his wildest dreams dare not believe exists. If a spokesman for the Dostoevsky cult were to be elected by its members, Murry would, I think, receive an overwhelming majority. The following sample from the Introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study (London, 1916) will serve to illustrate Murry's adulation of the Russian prophet: When we first come into contact with his novels, we are bewildered and grope about in darkness for this clue to reality. We read on as in a dream and we are in a dream. We read one half The Idiot, one half even of The Brothers Karamazov, and in reading pass through a fire of spiritual experiences such as one hundred years could not have kindled - and we find that in the measurement of earthly time, but a day has been reckoned. 20 Journal of Katherine Mansfield, edited by J. Middleton Murry (Definitive edition; London, Constable and Company, Ltd., 1954), n o . 21

Journal of Katherine Mansfield, op. cit.,

ill.

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Days such as these are like those of the prophet Daniel, or the Apocalypse, wherein we were taught at school that "times" was a better rendering of the Greek text than "days." 22 In a similar vein, Murry continues: We read again, and some of the dark places are made plain by a new light. Gradually ufJon the chaos of this pandemonium, with its ecstatic visions of unearthly beauty, simplicity descends. The new proportion, which was concealed from our eyes by the mere succession of the timeless world upon the world in time, is revealed. Some of the figures grow in stature until it seems that no integument of clay can contain the mightiness of their spirit. They pass beyond human comparison, and are no longer to be judged by human laws. 23 There is a great deal more in this incantatory style, but lest it be conjectured that Murry is writing merely for the sake o f producing an effect, we should note that he confesses that such really was his personal experience. H e says that he was sometimes "seized by suprasensual terror", and, again: " F o r one awful moment I seem t o see with the eye of eternity, and have a vision of suns grown cold, and hear the echo of voices calling without sound across the waste and frozen universe." 2 4 Murry's b o o k on Dostoevsky was the first major attempt to interpret Dostoevsky in English. Its appearance in 1916 comes at the height of interest in D o s t o e v s k y ; but it also comes at the time when Lawrence had already published Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, and was writing Women in Love. In addition, Lawrence had by then read the m a j o r novels of the Russian writer and had struggled through three attempts to formulate his o w n metaphysic. Thus Murry's unrestrained appraisal of D o s toevsky must undoubtedly have been disappointing to Lawrence and accounts in large measure for the vehemence o f his hostility towards both Dostoevsky and Murry. In order to appreciate Lawrence's response, however, we must bring together as many o f his critical opinions of Dostoevsky as space will allow; we will see then w h y Lawrence does not share M u r r y ' s enthusiasm for D o s 22 J. M. Murry, Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study (London, Martin Seeker, n.d.), 26-27. 28 J. M. Murry, op. tit,, 31. 24 J. M. Murry, op.tit.,33.

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toevsky and how Lawrence's response differs from that of the members of the Dostoevsky cult. 2 Early in 1916 Lawrence had offered to collaborate with Murry on a book on Dostoevsky. Nothing came of this project, but Murry tells us that while he was in France, Lawrence had sent him "various notes" about Dostoevsky's novels. Murry's statement is tantalizing in its ambiguity, for the "various notes" might simply refer to the well known letter dated 17 February 1916 in which Lawrence says: "I'll write you some "notes" on Dostoievsky - you can translate them into your own language, if they interest you" (C.L., I, 430); on the other hand, Lawrence might have sent Murry "various notes", which have not yet come to light and which, if they exist, would provide us with a broader context in which to examine Lawrence's criticism of Dostoevsky. As matters stand now, however, there are two documents which contain the bulk of Lawrence's critical response to Dostoevsky; the letter of 17 February 1916, addressed to Katherine Mansfield and J. M. Murry, and the Preface to The Grand Inquisitor, which appeared after Lawrence's death in 1930. We will examine both of these statements later in this chapter, but before doing so I want to bring together some other comments on Dostoevsky which appear in a variety of places. I will not attempt to arrange these comments in any strict chronological order, but I do want to begin with what is probably Lawrence's first major critical response to Dostoevsky. In 1915 Lawrence wrote "The Crown", which consists of six parts; the first three parts appeared in The Signature, a "helpless little brown magazine", as Lawrence called it, but the last three parts were not printed until 1925 in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. It is Part IV of "The Crown" that contains Lawrence's first statement on Dostoevsky, and some irony is certainly attached to the fact that this part of the essay did not appear in 1915, when Dostoevsky's works in England were so popular. We cannot take time to examine "The Crown" in detail, but the central thesis of Lawrence's essay is that there are two

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opposed types of consummation: spiritual and sensual, and that the ideal for mankind consists in a sort of mystical balance between the two. This idea is very similar to that expressed by Dmitri Merezhkovsky in Tolstoi as Man and Artist (1902), a book which Murry knew and to which he refers in the introductory chapter of Dostoevsky: A Critical Study (1916); it is, therefore, possible that Lawrence was also acquainted with Merezhkovsky's work. That Lawrence's criticism of Dostoevsky derives from the ideas expressed in " T h e Crown" is confirmed by Murry who says: " I did not agree with the view he took of Dostoevsky, whom he interpreted solely in terms of his own experience and convictions as expressed in the essay, The Crown. In Dostoevsky there were, he said, two opposed wills: one to the complete selflessness of Christian love, the other towards the complete self-assertion of sensuality." 25 Before commenting on Murry's assessment of Lawrence's position, let us see what Lawrence actually says. After explaining what he calls "the apotheosis of the ego", which leads to "the activity of disintegration, of corruption, of dissolution", Lawrence says: It is like Dmitri Karamazov, who seeks and experiences sensation after sensation, reduction after reduction, till finally he is stripped utterly naked before the police, and the quick of him perishes. There is no more any physical or integral Dmitri Karamazov. That which is in the hospital, afterwards, is a conglomeration of qualities, strictly an idiot, a nullity. And Dostoevsky has shown us perfectly the utter subjection of all human life to the flux of corruption. That is his theme, the theme of reduction through sensation after sensation, consciousness after consciousness, until nullity is reached, all complexity is broken down, an individual becomes an amorphous heap of elements, qualities. There are the two types, the dark Dmitri Karamazov, or Rogozhin; and the Myshkin on the other hand. Dmitri Karamazov and Rogozhin will each of them plunge the flesh within the reducing agent, the woman, obtain the sensation and the reduction within the flesh, add to the sensual experience, and progress towards utter dark disintegration, to nullity. Myshkin on the other hand will react upon the achieved consciousness or personality or ego of every one he meets, disintegrate this consciousness, this ego, and his own as well, obtaining the knowledge of the factors that made up the complexity of the consciousness, the ego, in the woman and 25

J. M . Murry, Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence (The Life and Letters Series

N o . 74; London, Jonathan Cape, 1936), 81.

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in himself, reduce further and further back, till himself is a babbling idiot, a vessel full of disintegrated parts, and the woman is reduced to a nullity (i?., 55-56).

I have given the above quotation in full because it is Lawrence's first critical statement about Dostoevsky and one which has been overlooked by other critics, and because I want to emphasize that Lawrence does not plead for either the pure sensual consummation or for the pure spiritual consummation. Surely Murry is being perverse when he implies that Lawrence approves of the "urge towards the final sensual ecstasy, whose consummation is reached in one devouring the other (as Rogozhin murders Nastasya)". 26 What Lawrence really approves of is a balance between the sensual and the spiritual, and his criticism of Dostoevsky is simply that Dostoevsky draws too sharp a distinction between the two, that he condemns sensuality per se and categorically endorses spirituality. As in his criticism of Tolstoy, Lawrence here also seems to forget who has created the characters in the novels. If Dostoevsky shows the two types of characters, "the dark Dmitri Karamazov, or Rogozhin" and the spiritual Myshkin, then Dostoevsky is obviously himself aware of the two opposing kinds of consummation, and he has given in his novels almost archetypal delineations of each of these types. The question is thus not what Dostoevsky does but what he approves, and we must agree with Murry that as far as Lawrence is concerned "Dostoevsky... strove to identify himself with the urge towards the selfless ecstasy of Christianity. He felt that his sensual seekings were wrong; therefore he was cruel, he tortured himself and others, and yet found pleasure in the tortures." 27 Those readers who would argue that Lawrence misreads Dostoevsky on this score would, I think, be hard pressed to find in Dostoevsky's major novels what Lawrence would call healthy sensuality. Likewise, they would find it difficult to deny that human sensuality in Dostoevsky is consistently presented as being gross and degrading, leading ultimately to self-destruction. We can, I think, see in many of Dostoevsky's characters a symbolic presentation of the struggle between the sensual and the spiritual elements in 26 27

J. M. Murry, Reminiscences ofD.H. Lawrence, 82. J. M. Murry, op. cit., 81-82.

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man, but sensuality is consistently ugly - in the prostitute of Letters from the Underworld, in the prisoners of The House of the Dead, in Svidrigailov, in Stavrogin, in Grushenka, in Nastasya Fillipovna, in Rogozhin, in Dmitri, and in Fyodor Karamazov. There is, too, Lawrence would probably have said, a symbolic killing of sensuality: Fyodor Karamazov, Nastasya Fillipovna, Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, without exception meet violent deaths. Lawrence's letters, as we have already seen in Chapter I, contain numerous observations on Dostoevsky, observations which are made in the heat of the moment. Most of these we have already glanced at, and with very few exceptions, they reveal an antipathy to Dostoevsky. Lawrence accuses Dostoevsky of being "a pure introvert, a purely disintegrating will" with "not a grain of the passion of love within him - all the passion of hate, of evil", (C.L., I, 332) and he charges Dostoevsky with making "the same mess" as Soloviev in his "fiddling about with orthodox Christianity" (C.L., I, 344). On reading The Possessed, for example, Lawrence confesses having taken " a great dislike to Dostoievsky" (C.L., I, 420). "It seems", writes Lawrence, "as though the pure mind, the true reason, which surely is noble, were made trampled and filthy under the hoofs of secret, perverse, undirect sensuality" (C.L., I, 420). Writing to S. S. Koteliansky, Lawrence says, "I could do with Dostoevsky if he did not make all men fallen angels" (C.L., I, 429). These reactions continue to build up until finally on 17 February 1916 Lawrence writes about Dostoevsky "in very cold blood" (C.L., I, 430). What Lawrence says in this letter has long been known to readers, since the letter was published in 1932 in Huxley's collection. In "Dostoevsky's English Reputation" (1939), Helen Muchnic devotes nearly three pages to an analysis of Lawrence's criticism; 28 and Gilbert Phelps in The Russian Novel in English Fiction (1956) also quotes excerpts from this letter.29 Lawrence's remarks are focused on three novels: The Possessed, The Idiot, and 28 Helen Muchnic, Dostoevsky's English Reputation, 1881-1936 ("Smith College Studies in Modern Languages", XX [Northampton, Mass., April and July, 1939], 75-78. 29 Gilbert Phelps, The Russian Novel in English Fiction, 181.

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The Brothers Karamazov; there is no mention of Crime and Punishment. Without commenting on the letter in detail, we may note that Lawrence objects to Dostoevsky on the following grounds: his concept of the two kinds of consummation, the idea of the willdominated ego, the juxtaposition of Dmitri Karamazov and Zossima, and the lust for sensual ecstasy. A t the end of his letter, Lawrence says "I'll write more if you want", but unfortunately Murry was not sufficiently interested in Lawrence's ideas, having as it were made up his mind that nothing could change what he himself was planning to say in his forthcoming book on Dostoevsky. The canon of literary criticism is poorer, I think, for Murry's failure to encourage Lawrence to write more about Dostoevsky. Since Lawrence wrote his comments in "cold blood" and his ideas in the letter are no more than "notes", it is more profitable to turn to his essays on American literature in which his ideas on Dostoevsky are given in a fuller context and are more valuable as an indication of Lawrence's critical response to Dostoevsky. Before looking at the essays, however, let us look at a number of comments which precede what Lawrence says about Dostoevsky against the background of American literature. A s I have already noted, Lawrence did not collaborate with Murry on a book about Dostoevsky. When Murry's book appeared, as might be expected, Lawrence was not impressed. Writing to Murry 28 August 1916, Lawrence says: Thank you very much for your book on Dostoievsky, which has just come. I have only just looked in it here and there - and read the epilogue. I wonder how much you or anybody else is ready to face out the old life, and so transcend it. An epoch of the human mind may have come to the end in Dostoievsky: but humanity is capable of going on a very long way further yet, in a state of mindlessness - curse it. And you've got the cart before the horse. It isn't the being that must follow the mind, but the mind must follow the being. And if only the cursed cowardly world had the courage to follow its own being with its mind, if it only had the courage to know what its unknown is, its own desires and its own activities, it might get beyond to the new secret. But the trick is, when you draw somewhere near the "brink of the revelation," to dig your head in the sand like the disgusting ostrich, and see the revelation there (C.L., I, 469-70).

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In December 1916, Koteliansky sent Lawrence Pages from the Journal of an Author by Dostoevsky for which Murry had written an introduction and which contains, among other things, the " D r e a m of a Queer Fellow". The following excerpt from the letter in which Lawrence acknowledges the receipt of the book reveals an almost pathological revulsion: Thank you for the little Dostoevsky book. I have only read Murry's Introduction, and Dostoevsky's "Dream of a Queer Fellow." Both stink in my nostrils. I call it offal, putrid stuff. Dostoevsky is big and putrid, here, Murry is a small stinker, emitting the same kind of stink. How is it that these foul-living people ooze with such loving words. "Love thy neighbour as thyself" - well and good, if you'll hate thy neighbour as thyself. I can't do with this creed based on self-love, even when the self-love is extended to cover the whole of humanity. - No, when he was preaching, Dostoevsky was a rotten little stinker. In his art he is bound to confess himself lusting in hate and torture. But his "credo" - ! - my God, what filth!(C.Z,.,1,492). N o doubt a good deal of Lawrence's hostility towards Dostoevsky is a projection of his disgust for Murry. Y e t in this same letter Lawrence says: " I have just read Deerslayer. What an exquisite novel. Oh, English novels, at their best, are the best in the world" (C.L., I, 492). Lawrence's remarks on Deerslayer indicate an important shift of his reading interests; he had already put aside Dostoevsky and turned to American literature. His letters for 1916 and 1917 are filled with references to the various books he read. Writing to Barbara Low ?3o M a y 1916, he says: "Here it is rather lovely to read. I have just had Dana's Two Years Before the Mast very good [Lawrence's italics]. D o you happen to have Melville's Omoo or TypeeV (C.L., 1,454). The same letter refers to his reading of such various writers as Melville, Dickens, Swinburne, and Thucydides. By July 1916, he has read Tylor's Primitive Culture and in September he is asking Dollie Radford for Burnet's Early Greek Philosophers. It is little wonder that Dostoevsky recedes into the background; but his reading of Dostoevsky is not forgotten, as our study will show. Lawrence's most important critical essays are contained in Studies in Classic American Literature published in book form in

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1923. But the first versions of these essays were written in Cornwall in 1917-1918, and some of them were first published in the English Review. They were revised twice: in Sicily in 1920, and in America in 1922-1923. Recently the "Uncollected Versions" were published by Armin Arnold in The Symbolic Meaning, and it is in these essays that Lawrence makes several pertinent references to Dostoevsky. To appreciate his comments we must keep in mind that Lawrence's approach to a work of art is to look upon it as expressing a subtle and complex idea in symbols. 30 In works of art there is, according to Lawrence, "a dual import": first, the didactic import given by the author from his own moral consciousness; and then the profound symbolic import which proceeds from his unconscious or subconscious soul, as he works in a state of creation which is something like somnambulism or dreaming (S.M., 19). To the central thesis of "The Crown", which as we have seen governs Lawrence's reading of Dostoevsky we must add the above critical concept before we can arrive at Lawrence's total critical response to Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky may very well insist that he is saying one thing, Lawrence would argue, but his art may reveal something quite different. The underlying religious passion in the novels may in fact be akin to that of "the Pilgrim fathers who", Lawrence says, 30 Lawrence explains his approach to a work of art as follows: "But artspeech, art-utterance, is, and always will be, the greatest universal language of mankind, greater than any esoteric symbolism. Art-speech is also a language of pure symbols. But whereas the authorized symbol stands always for a thought or an idea, some mental concept, the art-symbol or art-term stands for a pure experience, emotional and passional, spiritual and perceptual, all at once. The intellectual idea remains implicit, latent and nascent. Art communicates a state of being - whereas the symbol at best only communicates a whole thought, an emotional idea. Art-speech is a use of symbols which are pulsations on the blood and seizures upon the nerves, and at the same time pure percepts of the mind and pure terms of spiritual aspiration.

"Therefore, when we reduce and diminish any work of art to its didactic capacity - as we reduce a man to his mere physical-functional capacity in the science of medicine - then we find that that work of art is a subtle and complex idea expressed in symbols. It is more or less necessary to view man as a thing of various functions and organs. And in the same way, for certain purposes, it is necessary to degrade a work of art into a thing of meanings and reasoned exposition. This process of reduction is part of the science of criticism" (S.M.,

18-19).

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"were not Christians at all - not in any reasonable sense of the word. They were no more Christians than the dark and violent Spaniards of the Inquisition were Christian" (S.M., 25). Lawrence contends that "the first Americans departed from the Christian and the European vital mystery". They became dark, sinister, repellent. They seemed to seek, not liberty, but a gloomy and tyrannical sense of power. They wanted to have power over all immediate life. They had a gloomy passion, similar to that of some of the African sects of the Early Christian Church, to destroy or mutilate life at its very quick, lusting in their dark power to annihilate all living impulses, both their own and those of their neighbour. For all of which the Christian religion served as a word, a weapon, an instv ,-nt: the instrument of their dark lust for power over the immediate life itself, as it stirred to motion in the breasts and bowels of the living. This lust is latent in all religious passion. So long as a people is living and generous, it fulfills its religious passion in setting free the deep desires which are latent in all human souls. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, these were liberators. They made it possible for every man to be more himself, more whole, more full and spontaneous than ever man had been before (S.M., 25). It is perhaps strange to see a Russian novelist in the company of the New England divines, but this is exactly where Lawrence places Dostoevsky. That Lawrence was thinking of Dostoevsky as belonging to the camps of Puritanism and Calvinism may be gathered from the number of times that references to Dostoevsky appear in the essays on American literature. In the essay on Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Lawrence has occasion to remark: " N o free thing can bear to be encompassed by the psyche of another being, save, perhaps, in sheer fright or in sensual love. Thus Dmitri Karamazov, when he is exposed naked, is virtually killed. It is the encompassing and overthrow of the immune sensual being which he is" (S.M., 56). In the essay "Fenimore Cooper's Anglo-American Novels", Lawrence once again mentions Dostoevsky, this time recalling the scene from The Brothers Karamazov in which Father Zossima bows down to Dmitri Karamazov: Let every man get back to himself, and let the world at large sink down

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to its true perspective as the world at little, which it really is. Let every man learn to be himself, and in so being to give reverence and obedience where such is due, and to take command and authority where these are due. Let this be done spontaneously, from the living, real self. Otherwise we shall wind ourselves up till the spring breaks. And let us recognise secondarily, that truth of duality or polarity which is within us and without us, and which makes of equality a mechanical round-about at the very outset. St. Francis falling down before the embarrassed and astonished peasant, what was he doing? He was doing the same as Father Zosimus [sic], who falls down prostrate before Dmitri Karamazov. He, the spiritual saint, a creature of the one half, fell in recognition before the pure sensual being, the creature of the other half of life (S.M., 80). We can see from the above interpretation of the characters of Father Zossima and Dmitri Karamazov that Lawrence's approach to Dostoevsky is the same as that which he adopts towards the American writers. What he does in reading a Dostoevsky novel is to try to get at "the art symbology", and the two dominant symbols as Lawrence reads them in Dostoevsky are those of dark sensuality or "the pure sensual being"; and "the creature of the other half of life", or the "spiritual saint". A s a reader and a critic Lawrence is not satisfied to find the presentation of these extremes; he wishes to see "the movements of the pristine self, the living conjunction or communion between the self and its context", but in Dostoevsky, as in Poe, "the mystic, spontaneous self is replaced by the self-determined ego", and we get characters whose entire lives, whether they are sensual or spiritual, are lived from the exercise of will; none of these characters lives from the spontaneous core of being. Although Lawrence nowhere says so, he would certainly agree that it is difficult to find anywhere in literature a more deliberate act than Raskolnikov's murder of Lizaveta. In addition, the sensual excesses of Svidrigailov or of Dmitri and Fyodor Karamazov, these, too, proceed from the will or "the self-determined ego". There is a further dimension to Lawrence's criticism of Dostoevsky, the basis for which is found in the essay "Nathaniel Hawthorne I". Here Lawrence shifts his criticism from the characters of Dostoevsky to Dostoevsky himself. Lawrence is giving his analysis of Dimmesdale's character, and he sees in the New England

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preacher

Dostoevsky's

own

image.

Describing

Dimmesdale's

mental state during his last days, Lawrence says: Dimmesdale now hates his body with morbid hate. He lusts to destroy it. He practices horrible secret tortures, wounding himself with thorns, cutting himself with whips, searing himself. It is a common phenomenon, a lust of self-torture. He is the Inquisition unto himself. He has a hideous voluptuous satisfaction in the process. He is his own prostitute (5.M., 139)The relation between Dimmesdale and Dostoevsky is that the former "has an almost imbecile epileptic impulse to defile the religious reality he exists in". Lawrence's conclusion is that "in Dimmesdale at this period lies the whole clue to Dostoevsky". "It is the fatal, imbecile or epileptic state of soul, such as Dostoevsky's", says Lawrence, "which makes the one half of the psyche malevolently act against its other half, in leering, malignant progress of futility" (S.M., 140). There is something of the actor in most of Dostoevsky's characters: in the narrator of Letters from the Underworld, in Ippolit, Rogozhin and Nastasya Fillipovna of The Idiot, and in Fyodor and Dmitri Karamazov. In "Nathaniel Hawthorne II", published for the first time in The Symbolic Meaning, Lawrence once again draws a parallel between Dimmesdale and Dostoevsky: Nothing is more horrible than the disintegration that sets in in the minister's soul. He becomes obscene and dreadful, all the while preserving his sanctified mode. The fatal self-division takes place in his psyche, incipient epilepsy or imbecility, the desire to defile most horribly the thing he holds most holy. Dostoevsky's whole essence is in these last days of Arthur Dimmesdale (5.M., 153). Neither for Dimmesdale nor for Dostoevsky is there any place for the sensual being. " W o m a n still has no place", comments Lawrence, "save as the Mater Dolorosa, and the sensual being no acceptance save as the hated serpent." The reason why Lawrence brings Dostoevsky into the discussion of The Scarlet Letter is that he is attempting to counter some of the enthusiasm of the Dostoevsky cult.

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The Scarlet Letter is a profound and wonderful book, one of the eternal revelations. Those who look for realism and personal thrills may jeer at it. It is not thrilling in the vulgar way. But for those who talk about the profundities of Dostoevsky, it is far more profound than the epileptic Russian, and for those who talk about the perfection of the French novel, it is more perfect than any work offictionin French (5.M., 154). I do not wish to become involved in speculating as to whom Lawrence means by "those who talk about the profundities of Dostoevsky," but the remark could apply to any of the members of the Dostoevsky cult whom we discussed in the first part of this chapter. Lawrence maintains that "the lust of sin goes simultaneously with the solemn condemnation of sin", a view which he holds is equally true of Dimmesdale and Dostoevsky. In his essay on Whitman, he charges that "Dostoevsky has burrowed underground into the decomposing psyche" and warns that "there must be the sharp retraction from isolation, following the expansion into unification, otherwise the integral being is overstrained and will break, break down like disintegrating tissue into slime, imbecility, epilepsy, vice, like Dostoevsky" (S.M., 235). This last remark is related to the doctrine of individuality which I outlined in the chapter on Lawrence and Tolstoy. Lawrence also sees in Dostoevsky a denial of this doctrine. In the paragraph from which I have just quoted, we read: "For identities are manifold and each jewel-like, different as a sapphire from an opal. And the motion of merging becomes at last a vice, a nasty degeneration, as when tissue breaks down into a mucuous slime" (S.M., 235). The references to Dostoevsky in Lawrence's essays on American literature end on this note, but these essays are not the only occasions for his criticism of Dostoevsky. The experience of reading Dostoevsky is not forgotten, and it continues to appear in various other places. In the introduction to his translation of Verga's Mastro-don Gesualdo (1923), for example, which was not included when the book was published, but which was written earlier in the 1920's, Lawrence once again refers to Dostoevsky, this time to point up the contrast with the Italian writer. Lawrence contends that "in Mastro-don Gesualdo you have the very antithesis of what you get in The Brothers Karamazov.

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Anything more un-Russian than Verga it would be hard to imagine" (S.L.C., 276). Whereas the Karamazovs are preoccupied with their souls, "Gesualdo didn't have feelings about his soul". According to Lawrence, the Russians, and especially Dostoevsky, "have carried us to the greatest lengths" in the presentation of characters obsessed with the salvation of their souls. Putting the matter somewhat colloquially, Lawrence says: The merest scrub of a pickpocket is so phenomenally aware of his own soul, that we are made to bow down before the imaginary coruscations that go on inside him. That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people. Of course your soul will coruscate, if you think it does. That's why the Russians are so popular. No matter how much of a shabby animal you may be, you can learn from Dostoievsky and Tchekhov, etc., how to have the most tender, unique, coruscating soul on earth. And so you may be most vastly important to yourself. Which is the private aim of all men. The hero had it openly. The commonplace person has it inside himself, though outwardly he says: Of course I'm no better than anybody else! His very asserting it shows he doesn't think it for a second. Every character in Dostoievsky or Tchekhov thinks himself inwardly a nonesuch, absolutely unique (S.L.C., 275-76). Lawrence, as we can see, is critical of Dostoevsky's characters who are preoccupied with self-importance. Perhaps Lawrence had in mind Ippolit in The Idiot, but this criticism could be applied to almost any character in Dostoevsky's novels. The picture of Russia which Lawrence derives from Dostoevsky is that of a country "where the people are always - in the books - expanding to one another, and pouring out tea and their souls to one another all night long" (S.L.C., 278). It is interesting, I think, to see Lawrence using Dostoevsky as a sort of negative touchstone against which to praise Verga: "Perhaps the deepest nostalgia I have ever felt has been for Sicily, reading Verga. N o t for England or anywhere else for Sicily, the beautiful, that which goes deepest into the blood. It is so clear, so beautiful, so like the physical beauty of the G r e e k " (S.L.C., 278). Dostoevsky produced no comparable effect on Lawrence. The 1923 American edition of Studies in Classic American Literature contains a two-page Foreword which does not appear in

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the English edition of the same book. It is here that we have Lawrence's statement about the "two bodies of modern literature [which] seem to [him] to have come to a real verge: the Russian and the American" (5., viii). "The great difference between the extreme Russians and the extreme American", according to Lawrence, lies in the fact that the Russians are explicit and hate eloquence and symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, whereas the Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning. They revel in subterfuge (S., viii). The Russian writers who are mentioned are "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Artzibashev"; the Americans are "Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman". This juxtaposition of two bodies of modern literature in the Foreword is in a critical sense unique, but the essays in the volume do not develop the contrast. Dostoevsky is mentioned twice: once, in the essay "The Spirit of Place", where Lawrence says: "The curious thing about art-speech is that it prevaricates so terribly, I mean it tells such lies. I suppose because we always all the time tell ourselves lies. And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth. Like Dostoevsky posing as a sort of Jesus, but most truthfully revealing himself all the while as a little horror" (S., 2); the second mention of Dostoevsky occurs in the essay on Melville's Typee and Omoo, where Lawrence states: "Charity becomes pernicious, the spirit itself becomes foul. The meek are evil. The pure in heart have base, subtle revulsions: like Dostoevsky's Idiot. The whole Sermon on the Mount becomes a litany of white vice" (5., 142). In the first instance we see the explanation of Lawrence's method of reading literature for its symbolic meaning. Since Lawrence is writing about American literature, we have no reason to expect a detailed explication of Russian literature. Even the allusions which exist in the first version of the essays have been eliminated. After 1923, we find further comments on Dostoevsky in Lawrence's reviews of Rozanov's Solitaria (1927) and Fallen Leaves (1929). The attitude towards Dostoevsky in these essays is hostile: according to Lawrence, the worst of Rozanov is that which he has in common with Dostoevsky. In our chapter on Rozanov we will see how he resembles Dostoevsky and how he differs from him.

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3 F o r Lawrence's last major critical statement on Dostoevsky we have t o go to the Preface to The Grand Inquisitor. This is by far Lawrence's longest statement on Dostoevsky, and because it is focused on a specific episode in The Brothers Karamazov we can get a better idea of the depth of Lawrence's critical insight. T h e essay grew out of Lawrence's friendship with Koteliansky w h o had decided to publish an expensive edition of The Grand Inquisitor and had asked Lawrence to write an introduction. A letter to Koteliansky dated 9 January 1930 begins: " I was just writing about the impossibility of fitting the Christian religion to the State - send me The Grand Inquisitor, and I'll see if I can do an introduction. Tell m e how long you'd like it" (C.L., II, 1233). The tone o f the Preface is calm, almost reminiscent, detached, and thus presents a sharp contrast to the other comments which Lawrence makes about Dostoevsky. Lawrence's former statement that "the Russians are explicit and hate eloquence and symbols", notwithstanding, the Preface to The Grand Inquisitor is basically a search for the symbolic meaning in the work: If there is any question: Who is the grand Inquisitor? - then surely we must say it is Ivan himself. And Ivan is the thinking mind of the human being in rebellion, thinking the whole thing out to the bitter end. As such he is, of course, identical with [symbolic of] the Russian revolutionary of the thinking type. He is also, of course, Dostoevsky himself, in his thoughtful, as apart from his passional and inspirational self (S.L.C., 233-34)In searching for the symbolic meaning, Lawrence again invokes the principle, " N e v e r trust the artist. Trust the tale" (S., 2). Since The Grand Inquisitor is probably the most familiar section of The Brothers

Karamazov,

it is valuable to have Lawrence's

response to it. A t the time o f his first reading o f The

Brothers

Karamazov in 1913, Lawrence thought the episode was "just rubbish", " a piece o f showing o f f " in which Dostoevsky's "cynicalsatanical p o s e " was "simply irritating". A f t e r two

subsequent

readings, however, Lawrence " f o u n d it more depressing because,

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I29

alas, more drearily true to life". On reading the episode a fourth time, Lawrence says: " N o w I read The Grand Inquisitor once more, and my heart sinks right through my shoes" (S.L.C., 233). What does Lawrence see in the work at this time, we may ask, that he did not see before? The first thing is that The Grand Inquisitor gives "the final and unanswerable criticism of Christ", and because Lawrence was himself preoccupied with the criticism of Christ this episode from The Brothers Karamazov quite naturally interests him. Lawrence says, " w e cannot doubt that the Inquisitor speaks Dostoievsky's own final opinion about Jesus", but we must note here that Lawrence is distinguishing between the artist and the tale. Dostoevsky, Lawrence would concede, did not intend his story to be interpreted in this way, but the story gives the lie to the artist's didactic intention. Here is how Lawrence looks on Dostoevsky: As always in Dostoievsky, the amazing perspicacity is mixed with ugly perversity. Nothing is pure. His wild love for Jesus is mixed with perverse and poisonous hate of Jesus: his moral hostility to the devil is mixed with secret worship of the devil. Dostoievsky is always perverse, always impure, always an evil thinker and a marvellous seer {S.L.C., 235). Dostoevsky may have intended Christ to come out the victor in the confrontation with the Inquisitor, but there can be n o doubt, according to Lawrence, that the Inquisitor is victorious. The Inquisitor convinces even Christ that Christianity "is impossible because it makes demands greater than the nature of man can bear". Lawrence says: "Christianity, then, is the ideal, but it is impossible." The Inquisitor's love for man is truer than Christ's because it takes into account human nature; Lawrence argues, " M a n can but be true to his own nature. No inspiration whatsoever will ever get him permanently beyond his limits." Lawrence insists, as does the Inquisitor, "that mankind demands, and will always demand miracle, mystery, and authority". Because Lawrence agrees with the Inquisitor's criticism of Christ, critics have quickly come to the conclusion that Lawrence is on the side of the Inquisitor. Thus Edward Wasiolek, in F. M. Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (1964), has no hesitation in placing

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Lawrence among those critics who endorse the society envisioned by the Inquisitor. 31 To do so, is in my opinion to misinterpret much of what Lawrence actually says in his essay. There can be no doubt that Lawrence considers Christianity impossible and, in fact, undesirable; but this does not mean that he fully approves of the Inquisitor's blueprint for mankind. "Where Dostoievsky is perverse", says Lawrence, "is in his making the old, old, wise governor of men a Grand Inquisitor." By making this criticism of Christ's antagonist, Lawrence in effect reshapes Dostoevsky's Inquisitor into a peculiarly Lawrencean (the term is his own) "lord of life". And the society envisioned by the Inquisitor is likewise reshaped into Lawrence's Utopia in which "each man has his beauty and his wholeness in fulfilling his own true nature, whether it be the fulfilment of command or of service" (S.M., 78). To the ideal society of the Inquisitor, Lawrence adds a religious dimension, a reverence for human life and individuality, of which the Spanish Inquisitor would never have approved, and which he would in any case have been incapable of conceiving. "The Spanish Inquisition", writes Lawrence, actually was diabolic. It could not have produced a Grand Inquisitor w h o put Dostoievsky's sad questions to Jesus. A n d the man w h o put those sad questions to Jesus could not possibly have been a Spanish Inquisitor. He could not possibly have burnt a hundred people in an autoda-fe. H e would have been too wise and far-seeing (S.L.C., 237-38).

Lawrence does not endorse burning heretics for their own good; he does not embrace the grand Inquisitor, and it is only the critic's eagerness to condemn Lawrence that leads to a deliberate distortion of his position. If we examine the society which Lawrence envisions in his Preface to The Grand Inquisitor we will see immediately that this is a society based on Lawrence's interpretation of man's need for mystery, an interpretation which makes due allowance for man's weakness, but which does not slight life in any way. "Whatever makes life vivid and delightful is the heavenly bread. And the earthly bread must come as a by-product of the heavenly bread", is See Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., The M. I. T. Press, 1964), 165. 81

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Ißl

Lawrence's way of describing the relation between the religious and the economic aspects of his ideal society. The Grand Inquisitor could not have envisioned Lawrence's ideal society, but the Catholic church, according to Lawrence, once did when its rituals were in harmony with the great life cycle of the natural world. The critic who says that Lawrence approves of The Grand Inquisitor should ponder the following passage: Since man began to think and to feel vividly, seed-time and harvest have been the two great sacred periods of miracle, rebirth, and rejoicing. Easter and harvest-home are festivals of the earthly bread, and they are festivals which go to the roots of the soul. F o r it is the earthly bread as a miracle, a yearly miracle. All the old religions saw it: the Catholic still sees it, by the Mediterranean. A n d this is not weakness. This is truth. The rapture of the Easter kiss, in old Russia, is intimately bound up with the springing of the seed and the first footstep of the new earthly bread. It is the rapture of the Easter kiss which makes the bread worth eating. It is the absence of the Easter kiss which makes the Bolshevist bread barren, dead. They eat dead bread, now (S.L.C., 239).

Here we have the Lawrence dream of a society thoroughly infused with a religious reverence for life; and anything further removed from the Grand Inquisitor's sheltered society of children is hard to imagine. The Inquisitor is committed to "the value of complete submission", and his highest hope for mankind is certainly not that of giving men a feeling of being genuinely alive and part of the life cycle of the universe; instead, he says: W e shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever, that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions. 32

There can be no equating of "childlike happiness" with what Lawrence calls man's participation in "the great sacred periods of F. M. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett (Modern Library edition; New York, Random House, n.d.), 268. Further references in the text are to this edition and are abbreviated B.K. 82

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miracle, rebirth, and rejoicing". The society of the Grand Inquisitor could not give men a sense of renewal, a sense of contact "with earth, with sun and rain". The Inquisitor recognizes man's need for worship, we might say, but he is not genuinely interested in satisfying this need in any real sense; he is prepared to give men only an illusion of satisfaction. Lawrence, however, insists that man "must not break the contact" with the mystery of creation. "In the awareness of the springing of the corn", says Lawrence, "he has his ever-renewed consciousness of miracle, wonder, and mystery: the wonder of creation, procreation, and re-creation, following the mystery of death and the cold grave" (S.L.C., 239). Lawrence's criticism of The Grand Inquisitor does have its failings, but, as a notable Dostoevsky critic puts it, "In poetry and intent the Legend is of such manifold complexity that we may, with profit, approach it from many points of view and recognize in it many planes of meaning." 33 Thus Lawrence's response is significant even if he fails to spell out completely his criticism of the Inquisitor's vision for mankind. Lawrence is so taken up by the Inquisitor's recognition of man's need for mystery that he does not take time to consider the fact that the Inquisitor offers only a spurious mystery to mankind instead of a genuine mystery. In an academic critic, Lawrence's one-sided response would be inexcusable, and the charge of wilfully distorting Dostoevsky's vision could legitimately be made against such a critic. In the case of Lawrence, however, who makes no pretension towards academic criticism and whose critical dictum is to judge a work on the basis of its effect on his vital emotions, the charge of distortion would merely serve to shut out what insight the essay gives us into Lawrence's response to a reading of Dostoevsky. 4 We have now surveyed Lawrence's critical response to Dostoevsky, and we have seen how it rises to the surface in many unexpected 33 See George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (Vintage Books; New York, Random House, 1961), 328. Subsequent references to this work will be given in parentheses in the text and abbreviated as G.S.

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I33

places in Lawrence's writing on other subjects. The fact that such criticism appears at all is ample testimony of the impact of Dostoevsky's works on Lawrence. If the Preface to The Grand Inquisitor is indeed among the last things that Lawrence wrote we can say without any hesitation that the influence of Dostoevsky persisted throughout Lawrence's writing career. If Dostoevsky evokes from Lawrence a critical response, are we not justified in also seeking evidence of an artistic response? My opinion is that we are. Some recent criticism of Lawrence's response to Dostoevsky has in fact taken this direction. The most thorough and, for this reason, the most enlightening exploration of the connection between Lawrence's art and Dostoevsky's is by George A . Panichas in "Dostoevsky and Lawrence: Their Visions of Evil". 34 It will be recalled that in the Preface to The Grand Inquisitor, Lawrence calls Dostoevsky the "marvellous seer", and Panichas sees in this fact Lawrence's acknowledgment of "his real debt to the Russian novelist, as well as his kinship to his great precursor and teacher". Panichas analyzes the characters of Loerke in Women in Love and Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, and shows the remarkable affinities between the two men who embody "the disintegration of the human condition in its most naked and horrifying forms". It is unnecessary to give a detailed account of the comparison which Panichas makes between Svidrigailov and Loerke because the study is so well documented that there can be no doubt as to its validity. The study indicates that Lawrence's reading of Dostoevsky produced some fruitful results, and it points out how much the two writers have in common with each other, which helps to account for the ambivalent nature of Lawrence's response. Let me quote from the conclusion of Panichas's analysis: B o t h writers were concerned with the breakdown o f life; both revered the creative mysteries of man and the universe; both refused to b o w to the greater forces o f science and the intellect; b o t h were, a b o v e all, religious 84 This study was first published as an article in the University of Nottingham's journal Renaissance and Modern Studies, V (1961), 49-75. The essay is now included in Panichas's book on Lawrence, Adventure in Consciousness: The Meaning of D. H. Lawrence's Religious Quest (The Hague, Mouton and C o m pany, 1964), 151-79.

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seekers who sought to revive the real, living meaning of religion as the bond of human fellowship and connection. They were prophets and seers who utilized their art as both a contemplation of life and an exploration of the depths of human existence and experience. Dostoevsky was a great seer who was to define the predicament of modern society; Lawrence, in grasping the great creative accomplishment and message of his precursor, was in his own unique way to apply the definition to the everincreasing, ever-baffling problems of contemporary civilization.35 The designation of "prophets and seers" for Dostoevsky and Lawrence is beyond dispute, and the essentially religious nature of their artistic vision has long been established. Lawrence's preoccupation with religious ideas, both pagan and Christian, permeates his art and brings him, in this sense at least, very close to Dostoevsky. Y e t such is the complexity of the religious thought of these writers that only a full-length study could hope to describe the inter-relationships which exist. For the purposes of this chapter, however, we will confine ourselves to looking at one of Lawrence's works in terms of his artistic response to Dostoevsky. Several years ago, J. M . Murry drew a brief comparison between Dostovesky's The Grand Inquisitor and Lawrence's The Man Who Died: One of the last pieces of criticism Lawrence wrote was an essay on Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Suddenly, after being stubbornly allergic to it for many years, he pronounced it "the final and unanswerable criticism of Christ," also "the simple and unanswerable diagnosis of human nature". Men are, as the Inquisitor declared, incapable of bearing the burden of the freedom which Jesus sought to bestow on them. That is a truer love of men which accepts their limitations, and imposes a beneficent but absolute authority upon them. Not long before this essay, Lawrence had written his story The Man Who Died, which is as great a story as Dostoevsky's. In it, he represents Jesus as repudiating his own message; but mainly from a different motive. Partly it is because he recognizes that men are incapable of love; but chiefly because he now, being released from death, realizes the wonder and the mystery of the life of the body, and, above all, the beatitude of sexual love.36 Murry does not follow through the comparison of the two stories in 85

Panichas, op. cit., 179.

J. M. Murry, "The Living Dead - 1 : D. H. Lawrence", The London Magazine, III (May 1956), 58. 36

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which both writers focus on Jesus as the main character, and Murry's interpretation of The Man Who Died demonstrates again his incapacity for understanding most of what Lawrence wrote and particularly the story in question. Murry's conclusion regarding "the beatitude of sexual love" betrays the short-sightedness of his critical vision, for Lawrence's purpose in The Man Who Died involves a great deal more than proving that sexual love can be a beautiful thing. The fact that Lawrence wrote The Man Who Died before he wrote the Preface to The Grand Inquisitor need not deter us from reading Lawrence's story as an instance of his artistic response to Dostoevsky; neither should the fact that the immediate inspiration for The Man Who Died seems to have been the sight of a toy white rooster which Earl Brewster tells us he saw with Lawrence on Easter Morning 1927.37 We know that Lawrence first read The Brothers Karamazov in 1913 and that he re-read it twice before 1930 when he wrote the Preface. The exact genesis of a work of art can at best be imperfectly related even by the artist, and we can never know for sure what went into the making of The Man Who Died; however, we are more concerned here with what resulted. Before describing Lawrence's conception of Christ in The Man Who Died, let us try to distinguish the identifying qualities of Dostoevsky's Christ in The Grand Inquisitor. The importance of the image of Christ in Dostoevsky's work cannot be overemphasized; as George Steiner puts it, "In the Dostoevskyan world, the image of Christ is the centre of gravity" (G.S., 290-91). Steiner adds that "His imagination dwelt on the figure of the Son of God with such passionate scrutiny that it is possible to read a major portion of Dostoevskyan fiction as a gloss on the New Testament" (G.S., 291). Dostoevsky's portrayal of Christ in The Grand Inquisitor is really the culmination of several attempts in his other works. "Dostoevsky made several major studies and sketches for a portrayal of Jesus: Prince Muishkin, Makar Ivanovich in Raw Youth, Alyosha Karamazov. The only completed picture is that of the returned Christ in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" (G.S., 292). In his For a short account of this incident see Harry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (New York, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954), 364-65.

37

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presentation of Christ, Dostoevsky distinguishes "the human from the divine Saviour". Steiner's conclusion is that "It was Christ the man whom he [Dostoevsky] sought to envision and glorify. Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was ardently persuaded of Christ's divinity, but that divinity moved his soul and solicited his intelligence most forcefully through its human aspect" (G.S., 291). In Dostoevsky's conception of Christ there stands out "Christ's pre-eminent love", says Steiner, to which is added Dostoevsky's "personal experience of servitude and redemption" (G.S., 299). If there is one distinguishing quality in Dostoevsky's conception, besides the presentation of Christ as the Saviour, it is "the infinity of His forgiveness". N o human being, no matter how sinful, shall find himself without Christ's mercy or compassion; in a certain sense, the greater the sinner, the more wonderful is Christ's forgiveness. As Steiner phrases it, "Slavonic theologians [and Dostoevsky among them] delight in the paradox of Christ's pre-eminent love for those who come to Him from the edge of damnation" (G.S., 299). Christ's unbounded love for man is forcefully presented in Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor. Here is Ivan's description of Christ among the people: T h e people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in His heart, light and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love. He holds out His hands to them, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with Him, even with His garments. An old man in the crowd, blind from childhood, cries out, " O Lord, heal me and I shall see T h e e ! " and, as it were, scales fall from his eyes and the blind man sees Him. The crowd weeps and kisses the earth under His feet. Children throw flowers before Him, sing, and cry Hosannah. "It is He - it is H e ! " all repeat. "It must be He, it can

be no one but Him!" (B.K., 258). This description of Christ is later reinforced by two methods: first by Christ's silence, and second by the parting kiss which he bestows on the old Cardinal. What is the significance of Christ's silence and of the kiss? "The Dostoevskyan position", says Steiner, is gathered into the silence of Christ; it is realized not in language, but in a single gesture - the kiss which Christ bestows on the Inquisitor.

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Christ's refusal to engage in the duel yields a dramatic motif of great majesty and tact. But from the philosophic point of view, it has about it something of evasion. Dostoevsky's patrons in the Orthodox hierarchy and in court circles were disturbed by the onesidedness of the poem. The fact that the Inquisitor had not been answered seemed to give his argument an unanswerable force (G.S., 342). In another note on Christ's silence, Steiner says: "The silence is not, as D . H. Lawrence perversely argued, a sign of acquiescence; it is a parable of the artist's humility and one of the truest insights given us into the necessary defeats of language" (G.S., 292). Lawrence does interpret Christ's silence in the way Steiner suggests: And we cannot doubt that the Inquisitor speaks Dostoievsky's own final opinion about Jesus. The opinion is, baldly, this: Jesus, you are inadequate. Men must correct you. And Jesus in the end gives the kiss of acquiescence to the Inquisitor, as Alyosha does to Ivan. The two inspired ones recognise the inadequacy of their inspiration: the thoughtful one has to accept the responsibility of a complete adjustment (S.L.C., 234). Lawrence's interpretation, as we see, serves his own purpose; he believes in the inefficacy of Christ's teaching, and interprets Dostoevsky accordingly. It is easy to account for Christ's silence on the basis of the conflict between Faith and Reason. Dostoevsky is shrewd enough as an artist to realize that if he once allowed Christ to defend his position by the use of reason he would inevitably open the way towards a weakening of Faith. For this reason, Dostoevsky is reluctant to admit miracles into his version of Christianity because miracles would serve as convincing reasons for belief in God. A s Steiner so perceptively recognizes, Dostoevsky wishes to avoid exercising any compulsion upon men's beliefs: "Dostoevskyan theology and Dostoevsky's science of man were founded on the axiom of total freedom. Man is free - wholly and terrifyingly free - to perceive good and evil, to choose between them, and to enact his choice" (G.S., 294). A s for the kiss itself, Lawrence's interpretation once again results from his eagerness to condemn Christ. Certainly the significance both of Zossima's bowing down to Dmitri and Alyosha's kiss cannot be interpreted as acknowledgments of the truth. They are,

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if anything, symbolic manifestations of sympathy and forgiveness. In the same way, too, Christ's kissing of the Inquisitor most forcefully symbolizes the infinite mercy of the Saviour; only a Christ who is capable of infinite mercy could find it possible to forgive the utter blasphemy which the Inquisitor so self-righteously expounds. Dostoevsky's presentation of Christ in The Grand Inquisitor is for the most part a re-enactment of Christ's role when he originally came among men. The second coming, as Ivan describes it, concentrates on Christ's miracles of healing and on his power to stir in the people "responsive love". The re-enactment of his former role extends to a second arrest by the authorities and to a possible second crucifixion, for the Inquisitor informs Christ, "to-morrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have to-day kissed Thy feet, tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire" (B.K., 259). There is no hint that Christ would in any way resist a second crucifixion, and the only thing that saves him from it is apparently some inexplicable motive on the part of the Inquisitor, who leads Christ "out into the dark alleys of the town" and allows him to go away. If Dostoevsky's novels may be read as a "gloss on the New Testament", Lawrence's novels may be read as an extended criticism of it. In one way or another Lawrence's emotional and intellectual revolt against Christianity lies behind most of his artistic vision. A good case can be made for seeing in Lawrence's work a dual purpose: first an attempt to undermine or discredit Christianity, and second an attempt to create a new faith. Lawrence's revolt is symbolically focused on the image of Christ crucified; the new faith is symbolized in the image of Christ resurrected. Lawrence rejects the very image of Christ which Dostoevsky so poignantly evokes in The Grand Inquisitor. For an image of Lawrence's Christ we have to turn to The Man Who Died, which can be profitably read as an instance of Lawrence's artistic response to Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's artistic courage in bringing Christ as a character into The Brothers Karamazov must certainly have encouraged Lawrence to make a similar attempt in The Man Who Died. But this is probably the full extent of Dos-

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toevsky's positive influence on Lawrence. The technique of Lawrence's narrative and his conception of Christ are sharply contrasted with those of Dostoevsky. The silence of Christ, for example, which plays such a major part in the narrative structure of The Grand Inquisitor has no counterpart in The Man Who Died; nor is there any character comparable to the Cardinal, whose purpose is to repudiate Christ's teaching. In Lawrence's story it is Christ's own actions which constitute the rejection of his former teachings. Christ himself says to Madeleine: " I have outlived my mission, and know no more of it. It is my triumph. I have survived the day and the death of my interference, and am still a man. I am young still, Madeleine, not even come to middle age. I am glad all that is over. It had to be. But now I am glad it is over, and the day of my interference is done. The teacher and the saviour are dead in me; now I can go about my business, into my own single life." 3 8

The rejection by the man who died of his former roles of "teacher" and "saviour" in favor of his "own single self" is really a rejection of Christianity in favor of the doctrine of individuality. Since I have already outlined the major tenets of this doctrine in our chapter on Lawrence and Tolstoy, we can go on now directly to examine how the doctrine is given artistic expression in The Man Who Died. Lawrence begins his narrative with a description of a young gamecock which has " a special fiery colour to his crow", and critics have been eager to seize on its phallic symbolism. Besides the obvious verbal pun, there are, of course, phallic implications in the way the cock prances among the "three patchy hens" in the peasant's yard; but the symbolic significance of the cock is in the vivid life which he possesses and which, in the act of tying him up on a string, the peasant attempts to restrain. "He was tied by the leg and he knew it. Body, soul and spirit were tied by that string. Underneath, however, the life in him was grimly unbroken. It was the cord that should break" (M. W.D., 4). The cock does break the cord, and it is vivid and unrestrained life that the man who died symbolically D. H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died in The Short Novels ofD. H. Lawrence (2 vols.; Phoenix edition; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1963), II, 13. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are abbreviated as M. W.D. 88

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embraces when he catches the bird in "his great white wings of a shroud". The escaped bird becomes for the man who died, not a limited phallic symbol, but an embodiment of the life which he had denied himself in the past, and the denial of which had ended in his crucifixion. As he rests in the yard of the peasant, the man who died sees in the young cock what Lawrence calls the "great swing into the existence of things". Not only does the young cock glow "with desire and with assertion", but the fig-tree which grows in the yard also puts forth its first green leaves, symbolic of the renewal of life. The period that the man who died spends in the presence of both the young cock and the fig-tree establishes in his mind the predominance of the life urge in the world over the death urge, what Lawrence calls here "the everlasting resoluteness of life". The destiny of life is more fierce and compulsive even than the destiny of death. Lawrence says, "The doom of death was a shadow compared to the raging destiny of life, the determined surge of life" (M. W.D., 11). In the comments on his past, which the man who died makes, we have Lawrence's implicit criticism of Christianity and thus his rejection of Dostoevsky's Christ. Lawrence's Christ acknowledges the inevitability of his past, but he has no intention of resuming his former mission. He shows a new kind of compassion which is dramatized in his attitude toward and treatment of the peasant. Since he recognizes that the "peasant had no re-birth in him", he is willing to let the peasant be himself. Lawrence's Christ also rejects the self-willed type of love which is the driving force behind Madeleine's desire to serve him. In rejecting Madeleine, he also rejects a life which would compel him to live for the sake of others rather than to fulfill his own individuality. In the young cock and in the fig-tree he recognizes instances of achieved individuality; in the peasant and his wife, and in Madeleine he sees a thwarting of individuality. He decides, therefore, to go about his business into his own single life, to claim that which is his portion. The decision of the man who died to go out into the world and to lead the life of a physician (not the life of a teacher) is vital to understanding Lawrence's meaning. Individuality is not achieved in isolation, in seclusion from the rest of society; rather, it is achieved among men, in a living social context and depends on the establish-

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ment of a multiplicity of relationships between the individual and his "circumambient universe". But there is one fundamental relationship which cannot be sidetracked or ignored, man's relation with woman. The man who died, it will be recalled, purchases the young cock from the peasant in order that he may release the cock "among the hens", and the significance of this action is that it dramatically foreshadows the man's meeting with the priestess of Isis. Lawrence, it must be recognized, cannot conceive of ultimate human fulfillment without the establishment of a vital man-woman relationship. Thus even in a story in which Christ is the central character, Lawrence does not shrink from presenting this relationship. In contrast, it is perhaps noteworthy that Dostoevsky in his major novels nowhere shows this kind of commitment to the manwoman relationship; and that in one of Dostoevsky's symbolic portrayals of Christ, in the figure of Mishkin, for example, a sexless marriage is nearly accomplished. Part II of The Man Who Died is primarily concerned with what might be called the re-introduction of the pagan veneration of sex into the Christian religion. Lawrence believes that the Church once possessed a healthier attitude towards marriage, and he tries in The Man Who Died to reinstate what he feels the later Christian Church had repudiated. His use of the Osiris and Isis myths operates on several levels. On one level, the use of the pagan myths is Lawrence's way of indicating the value of the pagan experience of the human race and the importance of this experience as a complement to that of the spiritual experience of Christianity. On a second level, the myth of Osiris underlines the re-birth of mankind which Lawrence hopes will eventually take place. Finally, the rites of worship which the young priestess accords to Isis suffuse the relationship between the man and the woman with a religious atmosphere and underline it as a religious communion, which is Lawrence's way of looking at sexual consummation. The sexual relationship, perfected as it is inside the temple, may be read as a symbolic re-introduction of the sexual mystery into the vital religious context of the church where, according to Lawrence, it really belongs. A recent critic has deplored Lawrence's attempt "to particularize the way of [Christ's] fulfillment", and has said,

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Accordingly, this second part fails to sustain the effectiveness inherent in the first. The fact remains that the implicit meaning of Christ's discovery there is now exposed to a tiresomely detailed and asserted explication. Ultimately this becomes rather exasperating and tendentious, and one must come to treat it as the kind of exaggerated and insistent exegesis of phallic communion that, to say the least, does not achieve unqualified success.39 The charge of exaggeration and over-insistence results from a failure to perceive the nature of the literary method which Lawrence is using. The elaborate description of the way in which the priestess prepares the man who died and herself for their coming together serves to dramatize the ritualistic nature of their relationship. The repetitions are consciously placed there by Lawrence to approximate, as nearly as art can, a religious ritual; Lawrence cannot simply rely on "the implicit meaning of Christ's discovery there".40 Lawrence is committed to showing Christ undergoing a slow transformation, we might almost call it a re-birth, and the effective evocation of ritual enables Lawrence to make this transformation convincing. The man who died is shown as he re-discovers his sense of wonder and as, in a very real way, he comes into harmony with the greater life cycle of the universe. He recovers for himself that very mystery which in his criticism of The Grand Inquisitor Lawrence argues that men so desperately need. The man who died is not allowed by Lawrence to remain perpetually in a state of fulfillment. N o t long after the woman conceives a child, new dangers threaten him. He decides to leave: "If I stay," he said, "they will betray me to the Romans and to their justice. But I will never be betrayed again. So when I am gone, live in peace with the growing child. And I shall come again; all is good between us, near or apart. The suns come back in their seasons: and I shall come again" ( M W.D., 46). Unlike Dostoevsky's Christ, the man who died has no desire or intention of being betrayed a second time and of being crucified again. Under cover of night he makes his departure. By making him 39 40

George Panichas, Adventure in Consciousness, 132. Ibid.

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seize the initiative from his enemies and thus preventing the Romans from taking advantage of him, the last glimpse of Christ that Lawrence gives us contrasts sharply with the last glimpse we have of Dostoevsky's Christ as he is led, still in the power of the Grand Inquisitor, through "the dark alleys of the town". How great or little a part Dostoevsky's conception of Christ played in the shaping of The Man Who Died we cannot know for certain. It may be that not a single conscious thought of Dostoevsky occurred to Lawrence as he wrote his own story. Knowing Lawrence's familiarity with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, however, it seems unlikely that Lawrence could have avoided thinking about Dostoevsky's presentation of Christ's confrontation with the Grand Inquisitor. Read as an artistic response to Dostoevsky's story, The Man Who Died serves to dramatize the immense gulf which exists between Lawrence and Dostoevsky in terms of the value which they as writers place on the Christian vision. Dostoevsky's image of Christ becomes, as it were, the symbol of the very doctrine which Lawrence, in The Man Who Died, devotes all the resources of his art to try to supplant.

V THE PHALLIC VISION: D. H. L A W R E N C E A N D V. V. R O Z A N O V

No study of Lawrence's response to Russian literature can be complete without an attempt to arrive at a perspective in which to examine his reading of V. V. Rozanov. Like his attitude toward Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Lawrence's attitude toward Rozanov is ambivalent; but the ambivalence is not so equally distributed, for Rozanov's ideas and attitudes attract Lawrence more than they repel him. The main reason for the attraction is that Rozanov has what Lawrence calls "real passion", or to use a longer quotation from Lawrence: "Rozanov has more or less recovered the genuine pagan vision, the phallic vision, and with those eyes he looks, in amazement and consternation, on the mess of Christianity" (S.L.C., 247).1 It is this changed attitude towards man's sensuality and towards Christianity that for Lawrence places Rozanov above Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: For the first time we get what we have got from no Russian, neither Tolstoi nor Dostoievsky nor any of them, a real, positive view on life. It is as if the pagan Russian had wakened up in Rozanov, a kind of Rip van Winkle, and was just staggering at what he saw. His background is the vast old pagan background, the phallic. A n d in front of this, the tortured complexity of Christian civilisation - what else can we call it? - is a kind of phantasmagoria to him (S.L.C., 248).

Shortly after Lawrence's death scholars were made aware of the link between Rozanov and Lawrence, and the comparative study of D. H. Lawrence's review of "Solitaria, by V. V. Rozanov", first published in Calendar of Modern Letters (July 1927), is reprinted in Phoenix (1936) and in S.L.C., from which the quotations in this study are taken. 1

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the thought of the two writers has sporadically attracted critical attention since. Our first task in this chapter will be to review this criticism and to examine the basis on which it rests. Next I shall examine the circumstances surrounding Lawrence's acquaintance with Rozanov's work and summarize Lawrence's criticism of it. Finally, I wish to indicate several ways in which Lawrence's later work may be regarded as showing evidence of his artistic response to Rozanov.

1 The first critic to describe the link between Rozanov and Lawrence was Janko Lavrin in his book Aspects of Modernism from Wilde to Pirandello (London, 1935). 2 Lavrin's chapter called "Sex and Eros (On Rozanov, Weininger, and D . H . Lawrence)" does not reveal that he was actually aware that Lawrence had read some of Rozanov's work. Lavrin points out that some of Rozanov's "writings have already appeared in English", but does not speculate on the possibilities of Lawrence's acquaintance with these writings. "Sex and Eros" is for the most part devoted to pointing out affinities and contrasts in the ideas of Rozanov, Weininger, and Lawrence. " W h a t surprises one, at the very outset", says Lavrin, "in the work of Rozanov and Weininger is their all-absorbing scrutiny of the deeper aspects of sex", and he posits the thesis that "the passionate metaphysical propensities of Rozanov and of Weininger make one think of D . H. Lawrence whose query can best be approached through these two men". Rozanov is seen as "the Russian counterpart of D . H. Lawrence", for the following reasons: The ideas about love and sex, made current in this country [England] by Lawrence, had been expressed by Rozanov long before him - with the same emphasis, but often with a greater, serpent-like subtlety. For he, too, found his "mission" in preaching a renewal of life through Sex made innocent again and imbued with that mystery which would confer upon its functions a religious depth and significance. Like Lawrence, he hated 2 Janko Lavrin, Aspects of Modernism from Wilde to Pirandello (London, Stanley Nott, 1935), 141-59. The essay was first published in lite European Quarterly, I (No. 2, August, 1934), 88-96. See C.B., III, Note 57,735.

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asceticism as much as he hated the vulgar sexual licence. Finally, he made the same mistake as Lawrence with regards to the solution of the dilemma itself. That is why an analysis of Rozanov is bound to elucidate at least a few aspects of D. H. Lawrence as well.3 Lavrin next proceeds to outline what he calls "two basic features in Rozanov the interaction of which can explain his attitude towards sex, and also towards Christianity". These features are a "too little disciplined passion for the irrational" and a "much too warped love of life". Lavrin discusses briefly Rozanov's relation to the Russian Church, his attack on the spiritualization of Christianity, and his attitude toward the Jewish race. Most of the chapter is, however, devoted to Weininger and his distinction between Sex and Eros. When Lavrin finally returns to Rozanov and Lawrence, his conclusion is that "it would be impossible to imagine a greater contrast to the views of Lawrence or of Rozanov, and yet the dilemma with which they both were trying to cope was the dilemma of Weininger . The conclusion of Lavrin's chapter is an attempt to point up the similarity of the dilemmas of Weininger, Rozanov, and Lawrence; but this attempt is not wholly convincing. The assumption is that Lawrence suffered "from too much Puritanism, inherited and innate Puritanism, which he was anxious to eliminate by a forced affirmation of senses and of Sex". In addition, Lavrin imputes to Lawrence a "hidden fear of losing (through consumption or some physical defect) his virility". Neither the assumption of "inherited and innate Puritanism" nor the imputation of defective virility can be accepted without the production of more evidence than Lavrin gives. The hints of a connection between Rozanov and Lawrence, thrown out by Lavrin, were not followed up by later critics. It was not until 1951 that the relation of Rozanov's and Lawrence's ideas was again raised. By this time, what Lavrin had said in "Sex and Eros" was either forgotten or had been permanently shelved. When Father Tiverton (pseudonym of Martin Jarrett-Kerr) published

3

Janko Lavrin, Aspects of Modernism, 143-44.

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D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (London, 1951)4 some of the reasons he gave for his study were that there did not "seem to be elsewhere any account of Lawrence which discusses the changes from the first to the final (third) drafts of Lady Chatterley's Lover: nor any which touches on Lawrence's relation to the muchpublicized "existentialist" movement of our time; nor which deals with the influence upon Lawrence of the "pan-sexualism" of V. V. Rozanov." 5 Tiverton's remarks on Lawrence and Rozanov begin as follows: "There is one influence upon Lawrence which has, so far as I know, hardly ever been mentioned: Vasili Vasilievich Rozanov." He goes on to establish the link between the two writers by citing Lawrence's review of Solitaria (1927) and by pointing to the possibility that Lawrence may have discussed Rozanov much earlier with its translator S. S. Koteliansky. Tiverton sees some "remarkable correspondences, as well as highly significant differences" between the two writers; both were teachers at one time, both had trouble with pornographic censorship, both revered the phallic vision. Because so "very little is known of Rozanov in this country", Tiverton supplies his reader with three pages largely made up of quotations from Koteliansky's translations of Rozanov's Solitaria (London, 1927) and Fallen Leaves (London, 1929). The comments on the passages are short and sketchy, but they are also at times provocative. After quoting a passage in which Rozanov touches on Christ's possible knowledge of the phallic cults, for example, Tiverton asks: "Could this, perhaps, have originally given Lawrence the idea he worked up into "The Escaped Cock" or "The Man Who Died"?" Tiverton draws a brief contrast between Lawrence's and Rozanov's attitude towards prayer; and he concludes that there is "in fact, in the last resort something slightly thin and cold about Lawrence's sexualism which Rozanov, living in an older and a wiser tradition, was able to transcend". What Tiverton sees in Rozanov as being superior to Lawrence is the former writer's recognition of the importance of the family and of children. See Father William Tiverton (Martin Jarrett-Kerr), D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (New York, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1951). 8 Tiverton, op. cit., x-xi. 4

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" I t is significant, I think" he concludes, "that Lawrence was so insistent on disentangling the phallic reality from any mere utilitarian purpose that he goes to the opposite extreme of excluding the reproductive instinct from it altogether." The revival of critical interest in Lawrence during the "fifties" does not reveal a concern for Lawrence's attitude toward Rozanov. Neither Aldington's Portrait of a Genius But... (1950), nor the biographical treatments by Harry T. Moore in The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence (1953) and The Intelligent Heart (1954) record any evidence of Lawrence's reading of Rozanov. Similarly, F. R. Leavis's D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955) contains no references to Rozanov. The only reference to the subject occurs in Renato Poggioli's article "On the Works and Thoughts of Vasili Rozanov" which first appeared in Symposium, iv (November 1950), and was reprinted in Poggioli's book The Phoenix and the Spider (Cambridge, 1957). 6 Poggioli's article was first entitled "The Phoenix of the Soul: A n Essay on the Works and Thoughts of V. Rozanov" and bore the epigraph "Each Soul is a Phoenix" taken from Rozanov himself. The essay consists of more than fifty pages of closely packed scholarly exposition of Rozanov's ideas. The following list of section headings, which are omitted in The Phoenix and the Spider, will give some idea of its scope: "Part I: Rozanov: The Myth; 1. Prologue; 2. The Mystics of Sex; 3. The Books of the Soul; Part II: Rozanov: The Man; 1. The Psyche of Rozanov; 2. The Bourgeois and the Family M a n ; 3. A Freudian Case?; Part III: Rozanov: The Writer; 1. Rozanov and Literature; 2. Confession or Prophesy?; 3. Rozanov and Politics; Part IV: The Message of Rozanov; 1. The Religion of Rozanov; 2. The Message of Rozanov; 3. Epilogue." It is not necessary to attempt a summary of the ideas discussed in the essay; Lawrence's ignorance of Russian would, in any case, have precluded his acquaintance with most of what is explained by Poggioli, but I want to look specifically at what 8 See Renato Poggioli, The Phoenix and the Spider, a Book of Essays about some Russian Writers and their View of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1957)- Despite the earlier publication date (1950) of Poggioli's essay on Rozanov, the essay does not antedate Tiverton's remarks. According to Tiverton's Preface his study was completed in 1948.

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Poggioli has to say about Lawrence and Rozanov. After explaining why sex is for Rozanov "the supreme manifestation of man's life in the microcosm of the family, rather than the supreme force of the macrocosm, as it was, for instance, in Schopenhauer's view", Poggioli says: This also shows that the parallel with D . H. Lawrence, made by some of Rozanov's Western readers, is completely wrong. D . H. Lawrence's heroes and heroines do not need the sacrament of religion and society to embrace each other, yet they need the approval of Pan; and perhaps for this reason their sexual consummation takes place generally not in the privacy o f a room, but under the indulgent eyes of Pan himself. The only thing Rozanov and D . H. Lawrence have in common is their equal scorn for hygiene, that kind of spiritual exercise of the body. But D . H . Lawrence scorns hygiene in nature; Rozanov, in the home, too. 7

This is the extent of Poggioli's comment on Lawrence, and it may explain why the subject of Lawrence and Rozanov was not pursued by other critics. Poggioli's treatment of Lawrence in the essay points to the major difficulty in approaching Lawrence and Rozanov from a comparative point of view. By demonstrating the complexity of Rozanov's ideas, Poggioli makes it clear that only through possessing a thorough command of Rozanov in Russian can any reader hope to make an accurate assessment of the relation between the thought of the two writers. A t the same time, such a study would require that the critic be equally familiar with Lawrence, whose art and thought are no less complex. Thus so long as the language barrier makes most of Rozanov's works inaccessible to Lawrence's English speaking critics, or until such time as one writer can himself move with equal critical skill in both the worlds of Rozanov and Lawrence, a thoroughly penetrating study of the ideas of these writers can hardly be expected. It is perhaps this lack of familiarity with the total body of Rozanov's works which has prevented contemporary Lawrence critics from attempting to assess the impact of Rozanov's ideas on Lawrence. The only other recent study which makes an attempt to look at Rozanov and Lawrence in a comparative way is "Apocalyptic 7

Renato Poggioli, The Phoenix and the Spider, 174.

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Speculations in the Works o f D . H . Lawrence and Vasily Vasil'evic R o z a n o v " by Heinrich Stammler, w h o is sensitive to the opposed points o f view voiced by Lavrin and Tiverton, on the one hand, and Poggioli, on the other. 8 It is Stammler's opinion that "the resemblance between the two authors goes much further than their lifelong concern with religious pansexualism and the resuscitation o f the ancient " d a r k g o d s " " . H e believes that " a closer scrutiny o f the t w o authors' ideas of G o d would reveal that their immanentist, naturalistic, and cosmic concept of the Divine shows a surprising degree o f spiritual kinship". Stammler builds the case for Lawrence's interest in Russian literature in general and in Rozanov's work in particular, pointing out that "ample evidence for this unflagging preoccupation can be found in his letters, essays, literary criticism, and even his poems". The short study does not, however, document this assertion; instead, it only hints at the probable role of Koteliansky as a "go-between" in Lawrence's contact with Rozanov's work. The new idea, however, which Stammler tries to inject into the study o f R o z a n o v and Lawrence involves the "striking coincidence that both Lawrence and Rozanov finished their literary career and their lives in writing an Apocalypse, R o z a n o v the Apocalypse

of

Our Time [ji'c], and Lawrence a new evaluation o f the last b o o k o f the Bible". Stammler tries to make a case for "apocalyptic speculations" in the works of the t w o writers, but his attempt to use Sons and Lovers as an example o f an apocalyptic work is unconvincing. Other similarities between Lawrence and Rozanov are the following: Both authors share a pessimistic outlook as to the manifest and hidden trends of occidental civilization. Modern culture and society appear, in the evaluation of both of them, as a sorry alloy of deadening, abstractionridden positivism and a bloodless, hypocritical, quasi-Christian a-cosmism. Both of them denied what the modern age calls "progress" and did not believe in an overall beneficial effect of perfected technological civilization. 9 8 Heinrich Stammler, "Apocalyptic Speculations in the Works of D. H. Lawrence and Vasily Vasil'evic Rozanov", Die Welt Du Sloven, IV (1959), 67-73. 9 Heinrich Stammler, op. cit., 69.

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Stammler is, of course, aware that Frederick Carter's was the chief influence on Lawrence's work on the Apocalypse, but in the "ever recurring digressions" in the work Stammler sees a strong resemblance to Rozanov's "outpourings in his Apocalypse of Our Time [sic]". "The remedy both writers have in store for mankind", he says "is identical. It is the return to ancient, cosmic, procreative religion with its sexual symbols." The assumption that Lawrence knew more of Rozanov's The Apocalypse of Our Times than was published in Solitaria (1927) is, I think, a tenuous one for reasons which I will outline in the next section of this chapter; but the conclusion that in their respective works on the Apocalypse both Rozanov and Lawrence are trying to give their own versions of the "world view" deserves further investigation. Of the spate of full length books about Lawrence published in the "sixties" which includes Kingsley Widmer's The Art of Perversity (1962), Eugene Goodheart's The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence (1963), E. W. Tedlock, Jr. 's D. H. Lawrence: Artist and Rebel (1963), Julian Moynahan's The Deed of Life (1963), George A . Panichas' Adventure in Consciousness (1964), L. D . Clark's The Dark Night of the Body (1964), George H. Ford's Double Measure (1965), H. M . Daleski's The Forked Flame (1965), and David J. Gordon's D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic (1966), only Widmer's study broaches the question of the relationship between Rozanov and D. H. Lawrence. And even in this work the subject is relegated to an extended note at the back of the book. In explaining Lawrence's rejection of "moral imperatives", Widmer refers to Lawrence's approval of Rozanov's aphorism, " I am not such a scoundrel yet as to think about morals." Then he says: Incidentally, there are marked similarities between the notions of Rozanov, the decadent Russian intellectual, and Lawrence, which do not seem to have been noted. Two of Rozanov's books were translated by a close friend of Lawrence, S. S. Koteliansky, and Lawrence reviewed the translations. In Solitaria, Rozanov, like Lawrence, talks of sex as the way to God, of the sun as "greater than Christ," of "passion" as the true force of life, and of phallicism in connection with Dionysus and the apocalypse. In Fallen Leaves, Rozanov, too, puts life over literature and paganism over Christianity - unless Christianity becomes "phallic" since "pseudo-compassion" is destroying our civilization. Rozanov at-

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tacks the "onanism" of the middle classes; insists that "sex is power"; and so on. Although he is apparently a considerably duller writer than Lawrence, we canfindmuch that appears in Lawrence's later works.10 It will be apparent from our previous discussion that Widmer is inaccurate in observing that the similarities between Rozanov and Lawrence "do not seem to have been noted". Nor is it likely, judging from the nature of the similarities, that future Lawrence critics will be satisfied to leave the matter as it now stands. 2 The inclusion of some previously unpublished Lawrence letters to S. S. Koteliansky in The Quest for Rananim (Montreal, 1970) has made it possible to establish more accurately than at any time previously the nature of the circumstances surrounding Lawrence's reading of Rozanov. Prior to Koteliansky's translation of Solitaria (1927), Lawrence could have known very little of Rozanov; what would have been at most available to him as an English reader is contained in Mirsky's treatment of Rozanov in Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925. It is unlikely, however, that Lawrence had recourse to this volume, for in 1929 when he did his review of Fallen Leaves, he writes to Koteliansky: " I got Rosanov [ J / C ] , and some of it I think really good - the latter half. I did a small article on it, and sent to Curtis Brown, but probably they'll not be able to place it. I said in it that Rosanov died a few years later than Fallen Leaves - 1912 That's right, isn't it?" (C.L., II, 1217). Access to Mirsky's account would have made it easy for Lawrence to correct his error; he would have found there that Rozanov did not die until 1919, and Fallen Leaves first appeared in 1913, followed by Fallen Leaves, a Second Basketful (1915). At the time of writing his review, Lawrence does not seem to have bothered consulting Solitaria, which he reviewed in 1927, for in the "Critic-Biographical Study" at the beginning of that book is a record of the publication date of Fallen See Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence's Shorter Fictions (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1962), 229. I have omitted Widmer's parentheses and page numbers in my quotation. 10

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Leaves and the date of Rozanov's death. Lawrence's paucity of biographical information did not spoil his review of Fallen Leaves; he simply said, "The book was written, apparently, round about 1912: and the author died a few years later" (S.L.C., 250). Were it not for the letter to Koteliansky, we should not have guessed the reason behind Lawrence's cautiously worded statement. In his essay on Lawrence and Rozanov, Stammler says: "It can be assumed, however, with some degree of certainty that he [Koteliansky] talked over with Lawrence, his faithful reviewer, what he intended to do, took counsel with him as to which sections from the material would be the most suitable for a translation, so that actually Lawrence knew much more about these works [Rozanov's] than was finally presented to the reading public." 11 Stammler implies that Lawrence was intimately involved in translations of Rozanov, and quotes from Moore's The Intelligent Heart the Rota story which we discussed in Chapter II of this study. Stammler's assumption is, I think, unwarranted. By examining Lawrence's correspondence we can pin down quite accurately the time of Lawrence's first acquaintance with Solitaria. In a letter to Koteliansky dated 13 April 1927, Lawrence says: "I got back yesterday and found your book had no idea that you were sending it, or even had written it. But it looks quite thrilling, and I shall read it as soon as I feel I'm here" (C.L., II, 972-73). My earlier conjecture was that when Lawrence returned to Scandicci on 12 April 1927 he found waiting for him a copy of Koteliansky's translation of Rozanov's Solitaria, but the evidence on which this conclusion formerly rested was uncertain because two of Koteliansky's translations appeared during the spring of 1927 in close succession: Anton Tchekhov's Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences was published in March, 1927; Rozanov's Solitaria in April, 1927.12 It could logically be argued, therefore, that in his letter dated 13 April 1927 Lawrence refers to either of these books; but, knowing Lawrence's antipathy towards Chekhov, I thought it highly unlikely that he would have said of Chekhov's book that "it Heinrich Stammler, op. cii., 68. See my article "The Phallic Vision: D. H. Lawrence and V. V. Rozanov", CLS, IV, No. 3 (1967), 283-97.

II

12

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looks quite thrilling" and promised to read it as soon as possible. In Chekhov, Lawrence would hardly have found something "thrilling", but if the book in question was Solitaria, Lawrence's subsequent review of it clearly explains the reason for his immediate enthusiasm for Rozanov. Unfortunately, there was no reference to Rozanov in Lawrence's previously published letters until 13 June 1927 in which he tells Koteliansky: "Your letter today! No luck with Rozanov! I'm sorry! But not surprised. What dirty rag of a paper would dare print the review! The world goes from bad to worse. But cheer up, we're not dead yet!" (C.L., II, 984). The "review" is obviously that of Solitaria; Lawrence must have written it and sent it to Koteliansky at some time prior to 13 June 1927. The correspondence which is now available reveals that Lawrence wrote at least four letters to Koteliansky between 13 April 1927 and 13 June 1927. It is Lawrence's letter dated 27 April 1927 which provides the missing clue: "I read Rozanov as soon as he came: and wrote a criticism as soon as I'd read him: and send you the criticism so you will know what I think. D o you agree at all?" (Q.R., 310). And he later adds: " I was very pleased to have Rozanov - I'm really rather tired of Tchekov & Dostoevsky people: they're so Murryish" (Q.R., 310). The letter also makes it clear that Koteliansky had in fact sent Lawrence both the translation of Rozanov's Solitaria and the translation of Anton Tchekhov's Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences. "I'll read the Tchekov book next", Lawrence writes, "but Tchekov, being particularly a pet of Murry and Katharine, is rather potted shrimps to me" (Q.R., 311). The difficulty which Koteliansky had at first experienced in trying to get Lawrence's criticism of Solitaria published was overcome, and the essay appeared in the Calendar of Modern Letters (July, 1927). Let me now turn to Lawrence's review for an idea of what must be regarded as his first critical response to Rozanov. Lawrence's account of his reaction to Solitaria is without any doubt his best piece of literary criticism in the area of Russian literature. In the first place, Lawrence presents a balanced point of view; he accounts for both the repulsion and the attraction in Rozanov's work. The review may be divided into two equal parts;

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in the first Lawrence analyzes what may be termed the Dostoevskyan strain in Rozanov, and in the second we have Lawrence's exposition of the characteristically Rozanov vision that the work embodies. There is no evidence that Lawrence draws on any other works besides Solitaria in the remarks he makes, and the whole tone of the review suggests that he wishes he had ready access to more of Rozanov's book The Apocalypse of Our Times. The Dostoevskyan strain in Rozanov is described by Lawrence as his "Russianitis", of which the literary symptoms and manifestations are remarkably like the objections which Lawrence raises to Dostoevsky. Rozanov has the same qualities as other "morbidly introspective Russians, morbidly wallowing in adoration of Jesus" who "seek unspeakable humiliation for themselves, and call it Christ-like". Lawrence says: "The more Dostoievsky gets worked up about the tragic nature of the human soul, the more I lose interest." "And in Rozanov", says Lawrence, "one fears one has got a pup out of the Dostoievsky kennel." There is the same kind of "self-probing" in Rozanov that Lawrence hates in Dostoevsky. But if there are objectionable things in Rozanov, "in Solitaria there are occasional profound things" as well. The part of Solitaria which Lawrence finds contains "a real thing to deal with" is the series of extracts from The Apocalypse of Our Times. Here, according to Lawrence, "the style changes" and "we wish to heaven we had been given it instead". As for the author, Rozanov had a real man in him, and it is true, what he says of himself, that he did not feel in himself that touch of the criminal which Dostoievsky felt in himself. Rozanov was not a criminal. Somewhere, he was integral, and grave, and a seer, a true one, not a gamin. We see it all in his Apocalypse. He is not really a Dostoievskian. That's only his Russianitis 0S.L.C., 247). What excites Lawrence most is Rozanov's recovery of "the genuine pagan vision, the phallic vision"; this is in effect the vision which justifies Mirsky's assessment that Rozanov was "the greatest revelation of the Russian mind yet to be shown to the West". I think it is of the greatest significance that in this review of Solitaria Lawrence, for the first time, speaks of "the phallic vision", and I

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think that the later artistic consequences of this vision are in a large measure traceable to his reading of Rozanov at this stage of Lawrence's career as a writer. I do not mean to imply that prior to this time Lawrence was not concerned with "the phallic vision", but it appears as if, quite suddenly, he glimpsed exactly what he had been trying to say in all his previous work. If such is in fact the case, it is no wonder that Lawrence says of Rozanov: He is the first Russian, as far as lam concerned, who has ever said anything to me [Italics mine]. And his vision is full of passion, vivid, valid. He is the first to see that immortality is in the vividness of life, not in the loss of life. The butterfly becomes a whole revelation to him: and to us. When Rozanov is wholly awake, and a new man, a risen man, the living and resurrected pagan, then he is a great man and a great seer, and perhaps, as he says himself, the first Russian to emerge... When Rozanov is in this mood, and in this vision, he is not dual, nor divided against himself. He is one complete thing. His vision and his passion are positive, non-tragical (S.L.C., 248). In the concluding section of this chapter we will examine the relation between Rozanov's "phallic vision" and Lawrence's The Man Who Died, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, both of which were written after Lawrence came to know Solitaria. Lawrence's letters reveal that shortly before his reading of Solitaria, he was for a time combining painting with creative writing, having completed the first draft of Lady Chatterleys Lover by 8 March 1927. On 27 February 1927, referring to his paintings in a letter to E. H. Brewster he tries to put into words what he is attempting to do in painting: " I stick to what I told you, and put a phallus, a lingam you call it, in each one of my pictures somewhere. A n d I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief, that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and still is denied" (C.L., II, 967). Later, in a statement about Lady Chatterlefs Lover, now completed in its first draft, he says: " I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furthest I've gone" (C.L., II, 972). The first draft of Lady Chatterley's Lover does not go very far, if we compare it with the final

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version. Something seems to have convinced Lawrence that he must go even further than he had done. My suggestion is that his reading of Rozanov, which he himself calls a "revelation" helped to clarify his artistic vision, or at least confirmed his artistic intuition that he was heading in the right direction. Koteliansky's second translation, Fallen Leaves, was published in November, 1929. Lawrence seems, however, to have known something about this book as early as January, for in a letter to Koteliansky dated 11 January 1929, he says, " I forgot to mention Rosanov [sic] to Stephensen - but he's only just got back to London - so let him get started with his Mandrake - he'd do it in that press" (C.L., II, 1118). By Stephensen, Lawrence means P. R. Stephensen who operated the Fanfrolico Press in London from 1926 to 1929. In a letter dated 10 September 1929, Lawrence writes Koteliansky: "If the Mandrake [press] have any success with Rozanov, we ought to follow it up with a new edition of All Things Are Possible" (C.L., II, 1193), which also points to prior knowledge of the plans to publish Fallen Leaves. Lawrence reviewed this book, as we have seen, some time in November 1929, shortly after its publication; but there is none of that enthusiasm for Rozanov that we see for Solitaria. Fallen Leaves is for Lawrence "on the whole quiet and sad, and truly Russian" (S.L.C., 250).13 There are a few remarks on Rozanov's style, on his attempt to introduce "a new tone into literature, the tone of manuscript, a manuscript being unique and personal, coming from the individual alone direct to the reader". Lawrence grants that Rozanov is sincere, and he sympathizes with the heroic attempt which the writer made in an effort to "come through to real honest feeling". Lawrence says: "And in his measure, he succeeded. After all the Dostoievskian hideous "impurity" he did achieve a certain final purity, or genuineness, or true individuality, towards the end" (S.L.C., 252). If we consider the value that Lawrence places on individuality, he could not have bestowed a more approving quality on Rozanov.

13 D. H. Lawrence's review of "Fallen Leaves, by V. V. Rozanov", first published in the periodical Everyman (23 January 1930), is reprinted in Phoenix (1936) and in S.L.C., from which the quotations in this study are taken.

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The note on which the review of Fallen Leaves ends is pessimistic. Rozanov has foreseen the "great débâcle". Lawrence writes: Anyone who understands in the least Rozanov's state of soul, in which, apparently, he was born, born with this awful insentient stoniness somewhere in him, must sympathise deeply with his real suffering and his real struggle to get back a positive self, a feeling self: to overcome the "dreaminess," to dissolve the stone (S.L.C., 254). The handwriting is on the wall, so to speak, for modern man, whose denial of the spontaneous life will at last destroy him. Lawrence concludes, "Rozanov is modern, terribly modern. And if he does not put the fear of G o d into us, he puts a real fear of destiny, or of doom: and of "civilisation" which does not come from within, but which is poured over the mind, by "education"" (S.L.C., 254). There is a tone of resignation in Lawrence's criticism of Fallen Leaves, perhaps to be accounted for in Lawrence's personal frustrations of this period in his life. He seems to realize that it may not, after all, be possible to regenerate mankind and thereby prevent the débâcle. There is, however, little likelihood that Lawrence's reading of Fallen Leaves affected his writing of The Man Who Died or Lady Chatterley's Lover. The former work was apparently completed as early as August 1928; the latter, in its third version, was completed in January 1928, and published by Lawrence in July 1928.

3 A n attempt to read The Man Who Died and Lady Chatterley's Lover in terms of Lawrence's artistic response to Rozanov is open to question as is, indeed, every study which seeks to probe the possible relation between the works of one writer and another. In the case of Lawrence and Rozanov the problem is complicated by the fact that the forms which the two writers use are completely different; there are, for example, no two novels to compare, nor two short stories or dramas. Instead, what we have is a work, in the case of Rozanov, which defies definition although, as Lawrence himself observes, it is " o f a kind not uncommon in Russia", and which, to quote Law-

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rence again, "is a sort of philosophical work". Lawrence's works, on the other hand, are examples of creative fiction. We do not know when Lawrence began writing The Man Who Died. The first mention of the story is in a letter to E. H. Brewster dated 3 May 1927: " I wrote a story of the Resurrection", says Lawrence, "where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more - so cuts out - and as he heals up, he begins to find what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven - and thanks his stars he needn't have a "mission" any more. It's called The Escaped Cock, from that toy in Volterra. D o you remember?" (C.L., II, 975). Since Lawrence had, as I have shown, received Solitaria on 12 April 1927, the fact that the creation of The Man Who Died came so closely after reading Rozanov carries important implications. The Man Who Died was written in two parts; Part I was completed by 3 May 1927 and published separately by the Forum in February 1928.14 Part II was completed by 27 August 1928, for in a letter of that date to Laurence Pollinger Lawrence says: " I finished the second half of The Escaped Cock, about 10,000 words - rather lovely - but I feel tender about giving it out for publication" (C.L., II, 1081). That Lawrence planned to write Part II at the time he first began his story is evident from a letter to Curtis Brown, dated 15 March 1928. Referring to The Escaped Cock, Part I of which had already been published in The Forum, Lawrence says: "I shall write a second half to it - the phallic second half I always intended to add to it" (Z,.,

The publication history of The Man Who Died is given by Warren Roberts in A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (1963), 125. Professor Roberts does not record the fact that Part I of "The Escaped Cock", as it appeared in The Forum (February, 1928), 286-96, was revised by Lawrence when he added Part II. There is also an earlier version of Part II, the text of which is considerably different from the published version. A brief account of the differences in the various manuscripts of The Man Who Died is given by E. W. Tedlock, Jr. in The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts: A Descriptive Bibliography (Albuquerque, 1948), 65-69. For a list of the various typescripts of The Man Who Died, see Item E 116 in A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 311. For an account of the three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover, see E. W. Tedlock, Jr., op. cit., 279-316. 14

i6o

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709). When he finally sends the manuscript to Enid Hilton on 2 September 1928, Lawrence comments: "I am sending you to-day the MS. of The Escaped Cock: the two parts. I wrote the first part a year and a half ago, and it came out in the American Forum, and brought down most fearful abuse on my head. So I had to do a second part" (L., 750). From what Lawrence says in his letter to Curtis Brown, it is clear that The Man Who Died was intended as an expression of "the phallic vision". Lawrence had no reservations about his story: "It's one of my best stories. And Church doctrine teaches the resurrection of the body; and if that doesn't mean the whole man, what does it mean? And if man is whole without a woman then I'm damned" (C.L., II, 1115). If Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor provided the symbol of negation which in The Man Who Died Lawrence tries as an artist to supplant, Rozanov's Solitaria supplied Lawrence with the artistic materials necessary to enable him to perform the task. In one of the passages subtitled "Crushed under the Bookcase", Rozanov in a metaphorical way poses the problem of how "to save, or rather to rescue from exceeding eternal torment a whole nation - of five, or eight, or ten million - we don't know how many there are of them", in other words, the problem of creating a new vision for mankind. Like Lawrence, Rozanov believes that as Christianity stands it offers man no real hope. "There is not a single tiny line", he says, "in the "annals of Christianity" which does not increase the burden of pressure", and he throws out the challenge: W h o can move aside St. Augustine? Such a powerful, exceptional mind. A n d w h o can move aside John Chrysostom? The very name shows what his words were like. And Paul the apostle? And particularly Christ himself? [my italics]. 15

The challenge is enormous, for "to start moving the bookcase aside just means to begin again the whole business from the beginning" and, Rozanov goes on, "the whole Christian history has pressed on us and crushed us. So many commentaries. So many "annotations". How can such libraries be moved aside?" V. V. Rozanov, Solitaria, translated by S. S. Koteliansky (London, Wishart, 1927), 155. All subsequent quotations from Solitaria are taken from this edition.

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Surely, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Lawrence decided to take up the challenge; Lawrence had in a sense been working all his life at the task of "moving the bookcase aside". Now in Rozanov's writings he finds confirmation that his diagnosis of mankind's problem has been accurate; Rozanov, too, affirms that "the evil of Christ's coming is manifest in the fact that there has come a civilization with a moan". As Rozanov puts it, "the bookcase has fallen down on man". He continues: "No. In all Christianity, in Christian history - in the way it has followed, in the way its spirituality has developed - there lies some evil. And here "the little flowers" of Francis of Assisi, as well as Anatole France and Renan, are equally powerless" (Solitaria, 156). But the question remains: how is the bookcase to be moved? There are innumerable bookcases, great libraries of them, "the Imperial Public Library of Petersburg, the British Museum. And in Spain [that of] the University of Salamanca; in Italy, the Ambrosian library of Venice". It is easy enough to say that the bookcase must be moved, but how is it to be done? Lawrence's creative imagination must have been already at work as he read Solitaria. On Palm Sunday, 1927, walking in Volterra with Earl Brewster Lawrence saw "a toy in a shop window, a little white rooster coming out of the egg" and "he told Brewster this suggested a title" to him for a story "The Escaped Cock - A Story of the Resurrection". 16 As we have noted earlier Lawrence wrote to Brewster after finishing The Escaped Cock and recalled the incident. There is, to be sure, no way of knowing what creative vision flashed through Lawrence's mind in Volterra, what sort of story he then conceived. My suggestion is that whatever it was, the conception of the story must have undergone a change when Lawrence finished reading Solitaria. The image of the rooster coming out of its egg was, I suggest, combined with another image which Lawrence's genius seized on as he read the last excerpts from Rozanov's The Apocalypse of Our Times printed in Solitaria. It will be recalled that Lawrence considered these pages a "revelation". "He is the first", Lawrence says 18

Harry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (1954), 364.

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of Rozanov, "to see that immortality is in the vividness of life, not in the loss of life. The butterfly becomes a whole revelation to him: and to us [Italics mine]" (S.L.C., 248). It is Rozanov's image of the butterfly, I suggest, that Lawrence's imagination fused with his own image of the white rooster and thus supplied the artistic materials which were transformed into The Man Who Died. Fragile and tender things with which to move the bookcases of the world, but such have always been the materials of great art. What does Rozanov say about the butterfly that should have amounted, for Lawrence, to a revelation? Rozanov's account is only eight pages, but it is so packed with significance for an appreciation of Lawrence's creative genius, as it is expressed in The Man Who Died, that a full explication of the subject could constitute a study itself. We can here, at best, give only a hint of the possibilities. The subtitle of this portion from The Apocalypse of Our Times is "On the Passions of the World". In it Rozanov gives an account of a discussion between himself and his two friends, "Professor Kapterev, the naturalist, and Florensky, the priest". The question which Rozanov poses to his friends is: " I say, in a caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly - which is the " I " ? " Florensky answers by quoting Aristotle's saying: "the soul is the intelechy of the body". Rozanov recalls: "Then it became suddenly clear to me - from Florensky's answer (and what else could Florensky have said, if not this?) - that the "butterfly" is really, mysteriously, and metaphysically, the soul of the caterpillar and chrysalis. Thus happened this, cosmogonically overwhelming, discovery. It may be said that the three of us discovered the soul of insects before it was discovered and proved in man [Rozanov's italics]" (Solitaria, 160). In his review of Solitaria, Lawrence supplies, as it were a gloss on this idea when he says that Rozanov "is the first to see that immortality is in the vividness of life, not in the loss of life". The Lawrencean concept of being allows for no separation of body and soul; in being itself, a living thing achieves its immortality. Rozanov's next observation on butterflies is that "beyond any doubt, all of them copulate", and he proceeds to expound "the phallic vision": It means then the "world of the future age" is preeminently determined

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by "copulation"; and then light is thrown on its irresistibility, on its insatiability, and - "alas!" or "not alas!" - on its "sacredness," and that it is a "mystery" (the mystery of marriage). The further, the more discoveries. But it is obvious that in insects, cows, everywhere in the animal and vegetable world, and not only in man alone, it is a "mystery, heavenly and sacred." And, indeed, it is so, in its central point, in copulation. Then we understand "the shame that attaches to sexual organs"; it is the "life of the future age," through which we enter into "life beyond the grave," into "life of the future age" (Solitaria, 160-61). It is my contention that in the above quotation Lawrence grasped the essence of "the phallic vision" which came to dominate his later writing. But how, it will be asked, does all this relate to The Man Who Died? It is impossible to explain fully, but some things are clear. The reiteration by Rozanov of the phrase "life beyond the grave" and the connection between that life and the sacred mystery of marriage, the later references to the fact that "out of the winter and through the winter [Rozanov's italics], having lain in the earth throughout the winter, the "seed rises from the grave"," the suggestion that the ancient Egyptians were in contact with the phallic mystery, the further suggestion that there is a connection between the sun and this mystery, since in the spring when the sun burns warmer, "all animals start conceiving [so that] the strength of the sun... passes into animals" - all these ideas find their way into the art of The Man Who Died. Rozanov asks: " N o w , shall we say with Christianity that all this [the ideas I have listed] is " a lie"? And that theology can be found only in seminaries?" Lawrence's answer is in The Man Who Died. The relation between " O n the Passions of the W o r l d " and The Man Who Died does not depend, however, only on the similarity of ideas. The image of the butterfly contributes to the very concept of Lawrence's narrative structure. Rozanov reports: Kapterev mused for a while and said: Observations show that in a caterpillar wrapped up in a cocoon and appearing as though dead, there actually begins after this a reconstruction of the tissues of the body. So that it does not only appear dead, but actually dies... Only instead of the dead caterpillar there begins to emerge a something else, but just out of this definite caterpillar, as it were out of the caterpillar-personality, with

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as it were a Christian and family name. Since out of any caterpillar placed there will come that butterfly there. And if you were to pierce the caterpillar, say, with a pin, then no butterfly will come out of it, nothing will come out of it, and the grave will remain a grave, and the body will not "come to life again." At that moment, just then, it became clear to me why the fellahin (the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who have evidently preserved their whole faith) cried and fired their guns on the Europeans, when the latter carried away the mummies, removed from the pyramids and from the royal graves. They, those European nihilists, dead whilst alive and tainted, understanding neither life nor death, had violated the wholeness of their (fellahin's) ancestors, and thereby had deprived them of "resurrection" (Solitaria, 164-65). The discussion continues with an account of the Egyptian conception of "life beyond the grave". Rozanov draws a relation between the cocoon of the butterfly and the Egyptian custom of sarcophagimummies; he asks: Why such a large, huge sarcophagus for a mummy of a dead person, which itself is not at all large: But surely this is the "cocoon" of the chrysalis-man; and the sarcophagus was invariably constructed on the model of a cocoon. Just as oblong and smooth as any cocoon which a caterpillar invariably builds, was the sarcophagus which the Egyptians made for the body "becoming a cocoon." And the body was put in winding-sheets, was wrapped, as the caterpillar of a silk-worm, just letting out silk threads and, as it were, making a "silk shirt" for itself {Solitaria, 165). He concludes that "altogether the burial ritual of the Egyptians sprang from imitating the phases of the caterpillar. And hence chiefly comes the scarabeus, the insect as a symbol of transition into future life, into life after death." N o explication can, in a sense, do justice to a work of art. Thus to say that in The Man Who Died, Lawrence's description of Chirst as he awakens in his tomb is a creative echo of Rozanov's meditations on the butterfly fails to convey adequately the true stature of Lawrence's creative imagination and its expression in art. The dead Christ, not really dead, as he comes back to life pushing the cloth from his face, and the bandages from his knees, is not, however, a far cry from the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis. Symbolically, the parallels between Rozanov's butterfly and Lawrence's

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Christ show how Lawrence's creative imagination works. In the same way, the toy white rooster which becomes that "saucy, flamboyant bird", the symbol of achieved individuality, in which body and soul are one, is another instance of Lawrence's artistic ability. The "lovely sun", as Rozanov says, also plays its part in The Man Who Died. Lawrence says, ...he lay down under the wall in the morning sun. There he saw the first green leaves spurting like flames from the ends of the enclosed fig tree, out of the bareness to the sky of spring above. But the man who had died could not look, he only lay quite still in the sun, which was not yet too hot, and had no desire in him, not even to move. But he lay with his thin legs in the sun, his black, perfumed hair falling into the hollows of his neck, and his thin, colourless arms utterly inert. As he lay there, the hens clucked, and scratched, and the escaped cock, caught and tied by the leg again, cowered in a corner (M. W.D., 9). It is from the life-giving sun that the man who died draws new strength, but the yard is also endowed with greater significance. Unlike the first creation of man raised by G o d from the dust, the man who died is brought to life by the sun. So The Man Who Died becomes in a sense the story of a new creation of man and, therefore, a repudiation of the Christian myth. The peasant's wife is a second Eve, who comes to tempt man, but the man who died, unlike Adam, rejects the temptation, and symbolically Lawrence's new man does not fall into the sin of "self-conscious sex". The man who died waits until he can be vitally initiated into the phallic mystery. In the second part of the story Lawrence pays due homage to that "mystery, heavenly and sacred", as Rozanov calls it. The symbolic wounds of Christ are healed and the man who died comes to a new wholeness. Symbolically "the phallic vision" is recovered from spiritual Christianity. Sitting there among "the woods to work, where the nightingales have a very gay time singing" (C.L., II, 973) Lawrence had, I feel certain, taken up Rozanov's challenge to move those ponderous bookcases of the ages, which were crushing mankind. How far The Man Who Died will have proved effective in moving aside "particularly Christ himself" is something which the very nature of art itself leaves to future ages to decide.

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Having made in The Man Who Died, as I suggest, the heroic effort to meet Rozanov's challenge, Lawrence did not cease to push against the bookcases. He had already worked his way once through Lady Chatterley's Lover, and now he returned to write the novel a second time. The second version belongs to "the spring and summer of 1927", 17 following the reading of Solitaria, and there is excellent evidence that this version of Lady Chatterley's Lover was influenced by Rozanov's ideas. The second version of the novel was apparently begun soon after Lawrence wrote The Escaped Cock. In a letter to Koteliansky dated 8 December 1927, Lawrence says, " M y novel I'm writing all over again" (C.L., II, 1025); and in a letter dated 23 December 1927, Lawrence calls his novel " a declaration of the phallic reality" (C.L., II, 1028). In subsequent letters he speaks quite freely of "the phallic vision" and declares, for example, that he feels "one still has to fight for the phallic reality, as against the nonphallic cerebration unrealities. I suppose the phallic consciousness is part of the whole consciousness" (C.L., II, 1046). When finally the third version of Lady Chatterley's Lover was at the printers, Lawrence wrote to Max Mohr as follows: It is really a novel contrasting the mental consciousness with the phallic consciousness. D o y o u remember saying that Rosanow [sz'c] is wrong, making sex the new great liberator. But I think even Rosanow [i/c] was trying to express the phallic urge and consciousness, not merely the sexual. It is quite true, sex today is all mental: intellectual reactions reflected down on to physical process: and that is repulsive, hasslich und widerlich. But the phallic reality is a free consciousness and a vital impulse, and is the great and saving reality (C.L., II, 1047-48).

There could be no clearer acknowledgment of the debt which Lawrence owes to Rozanov in his conception of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Both writers are agreed on what is the "great and saving reality". Certainly a great deal more went into the creation of Lady Chatterley's Lover than "the phallic vision" which Lawrence shares with Rozanov. Lawrence's knowledge of England and the impact of 17

E. W. Tedlock, Jr., op.cit., 279.

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industrialization, his familiarity with life in mining villages and reverence for the natural landscape, his command as an artist of the techniques of description, characterization, and what Julian Moynahan calls "his power to concentrate the drama of the novel within the space of a few square miles", all of these make up the complex structure. ...Lawrence summons all his powers of description to present this space as it is: a portion of English soil in transition from a semi-rural, semiindustrial condition to one of total industrialization. If the novel demands that we regard these few miles as an epitome of the larger world of Western Civilization itself, we may find it easy to assent because in so many ways Lawrence's microcosm looks and smells like the world we know. 18 Within the scope of this study, I cannot examine the part played in Lady Chatterley's Lover by "the phallic vision". Y e t the novel can be seen, I think, as another effort by Lawrence to meet Rozanov's challenge to stem the march of a "moaning civilization", and in Lawrence's attempt to restore "marriage, the mystery of marriage [these are in fact Rozanov's words]" 1 9 to its rightful place in modern life we can see the direct influence of Lawrence's Russian counterpart. It appears then that Lawrence and Rozanov do, in fact, share more than what the late Professor Poggioli of Harvard called "their equal scorn for hygiene"; and my study indicates, I think, that a comparison of the whole of Rozanov's thought and Lawrence's would indeed prove illuminating. Rozanov is still little known to English readers, as a fairly recent article by George Ivask in The Slavic and East European Journal (Fall, 1961) plainly shows. 20 There is a need for English translations of more of Rozanov's Julian Moynahan, The Deed ofLife: The Novels and Tales ofD. H. Lawrence (Princeton University Press, 1963), 146. 19 See D. H. Lawrence, "Apropos of Lady Chatterley's Lover", reprinted in Sex, Literature and Censorship, Essays, edited by Harry T. Moore (New York, Twayne Publishers, 1953), no. 20 George Ivask, "Rozanov", The Slavic and East European Journal, New Series, V (XIX), No. 2 (Fall, 1961), 110-22. 18

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works; the fruitful consequences of Koteliansky's translation of Solitaria for Lawrence's art are, in my opinion, ample demonstration of the value of that translation. It is inevitable that eventually a comparison of Lawrence's and Rozanov's thought will be made; when it is, however, the study will have to proceed far beyond that of Lawrence's response to Rozanov, which my study has considered, and have to have for its context the largerfieldof comparative literature.

VI CONCLUSION

We have now explored the nature of Lawrence's response to Russian literature particularly as it emerges in relation to his reading of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Rozanov. Our study demonstrates that Lawrence's reading of these Russians occupies so important a place in his development as a creative writer that it cannot be ignored by serious students of Lawrence. Yet Lawrence's response to this portion of his reading has been overlooked, perhaps not intentionally, but owing to the many-faceted personality that Lawrence was. Writing his introduction to A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany (1959), Harry T. Moore noted: "When we turn to the biographical aspect of Lawrence, we find this has been treated with such thoroughness in Edward Nehls' Composite Biography that it might not seem possible for anything new to be found on the subject of Lawrence's life; yet memoirs, commentaries, and related matters are still turning up. And a Miscellany must take such material into account." 1 The ironic fact is that despite the three large volumes of memoirs that make up the Composite Biography, there is in them no hint of Lawrence's interest in Russian literature; apart from Gertrude Millin's allusion to a row about Tolstoy and two or three more such incidental references, none of that host of "biographers" seems to have been aware of Lawrence's reading of the Russians. And if scholars were forced to rely entirely on these memoirs a vital element that went into the making of Lawrence as a novelist would have been missed. But if so many people who knew Lawrence seemed unaware of See A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, edited by Harry T. Moore (London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1961), xxii. 1

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his reading of Russian literature, or if aware, considered it unimportant and irrelevant, Lawrence himself has left a record that things were otherwise. This record as our study makes clear is found in his letters which have (we might almost say miraculously) been preserved, and which have made it possible to investigate rather fully Lawrence's reading of Russian literature. The letters enable us to pin down the titles of the books he read and to fix, fairly accurately, when he read them; in addition, the letters record many of his immediate responses to these books. Nor are the letters alone Lawrence's inadvertent testimony regarding Russian literature. That very quality of Lawrence's polemical writings, which has so often annoyed his critics, has provided us with an insight into the nature of his response to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Rozanov - not to mention the large number of other Russian writers with whose work Lawrence was acquainted. Thus Lawrence's habit of "speaking his mind", regardless of what he happened to be writing at any particular moment, becomes an important source of his critical opinions on the Russians. This habit, begun early, fortunately was never overcome by Lawrence and results in a discontinuous stream of critical observations which I have tried to bring together in the course of my discussion. Thus we have not merely isolated instances of critical responses to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Rozanov, but a series of responses covering most of Lawrence's life. At the beginning of his career, for example, Lawrence sets his ideas of Tolstoy against those of Hardy; later he sets Verga against Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; these contrasts are interesting and often illuminating. What are the implications of Lawrence's critical response to Russian literature? Does the criticism which has been brought together here compel us to see Lawrence in a new way? Several years ago F. R. Leavis wrote that as a critic Lawrence possessed "an unfailingly sure sense of the difference between that which makes for life and that which makes against it; of the difference between health and that which tends away from health" all of which makes Lawrence " a so much better critic than [T. S.] Eliot". 2 The recent 2

F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London, Chatto and Windus, 1955), 311.

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publication of The Symbolic Meaning adds to Lawrence's stature as a critic of American literature; and the nature of his response to the Russians points to still another dimension of Lawrence as a literary critic, a dimension which must be taken into account in any attempt to evaluate the very high claims for Lawrence that Leavis makes. Several short articles as well as a book-length study of Lawrence's literary criticism have already been published. The earliest of these is " D . H. Lawrence: True Emotion as the Ethical Control in A r t " (1955) by Ralph N. Maud; another is "Criticism as Rage: D. H. Lawrence" (1959) by Richard Foster; and one of the most recent essays "D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic" (i960) by Gamini Salgado. Besides these articles, we now have David J. Gordon's D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic (London and New Haven, 1966). All three of the articles that I have noted are sympathetic toward Lawrence as well as instructive. Ralph Maud points out that in his "technique of differentiation of the work from the author's intention is another element of literary criticism which Lawrence shares with [Irving] Babbitt", 3 and Maud draws attention to Lawrence's approach to American literature in which "Lawrence deals not so much with what the writers were trying to say, but with what they ought to have said, and what their works said for them unwittingly". 4 Lawrence is motivated, to quote from Maud's essay, by his belief "that if progress is going to be made, if a new consciousness is to be forged, the new thing will always hurt to some extent. The pleasure principle for art must go by the board; art's main function is to herald in the new and better life, to present the truth of the old and the new, whether it hurts or not." 5 It is these same principles which underlie Lawrence's criticism of the Russians. Richard Foster's essay "Criticism as Rage: D. H. Lawrence" is a spirited and convincing exposition of Lawrence as a critic. Foster says: 8 Ralph N. Maud, "D. H. Lawrence: True Emotion as the Ethical Control in Art", Western Humanities Review, IX (1955), 237. * Ibid. 6 Ralph N. Maud, op. cit., 240.

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His criticism, which especially interests me because, with my time, I feel a need for a "return" to something like moral criticism, provides the sharpest and most direct expression of his moral nature. And by criticism I mean not only the essays and reviews and prefaces, but also the letters; and of course by implication all the confirmations of the criticism in his fiction and poetry. Literature was to Lawrence a vast expressive record of the intellectual and emotional - and so, to him, moral - errors of mankind. Perhaps the place to begin with Lawrence as critic, then, is with the essential Lawrence - those raw, uncut, and unspoiled responses to literature that take the form of sudden and fierce moral assaults upon it.9 I think that Lawrence's reaction to the Russians gives ample evidence of his "unspoiled responses to literature". 7 If Foster is right in assuming that this is "the place to begin with Lawrence as critic", then my study supplies the materials for such a beginning. It is easy to misread Lawrence's immediate responses to the Russians, to dismiss these as mere exasperation, but the truth of the matter is, I suggest, that his responses are more than "subjective, capricious, dogmatic". A s Foster points out, Lawrence's "criticism has a breathless immediacy about it, an intensity of caring, a violent energy due in part to Lawrence's marvellously articulate rage, and in part also to his marvellously articulate humour. For humour, sometimes felt to be lacking in his fiction, is abundant in the criticism, though its function is vituperative, to articulate the rage." 8 In 1955 F. R. Leavis made two claims for D . H. Lawrence: that he was " a great novelist, one of the greatest" and that he was "an incomparable literary critic". Today few critics dispute Leavis' first claim; now, with the publication of David J. Gordon's D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic, Leavis's second claim for Lawrence also seems to be substantiated. Gordon does not always agree with Leavis (whom it is today fashionable to disparage), although he sees in "Leavis' own rage" evidence of "the Lawrencean spirit". By no means the final word on Lawrence's achievement as a critic, the ideas developed by Gordon are such that there will be no easy agreement either on the nature or on the value of Lawrence's 6

Richard Foster, "Criticism as Rage: D . H. Lawrence" in A D. H. Lawrence

Miscellany, 313. 1 Ibid. 8 Richard Foster, op. cit., 315.

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criticism. This attempt to admit Lawrence into the ranks of the great literary critics is not new. As I have noted, several articles on Lawrence's criticism have preceded the publication of Gordon's study. With the appearance of Gordon's book, however, the problems of understanding Lawrence's critical approach and of evualuating it are certain to receive a new impetus. For the one thing that Gordon succeeds in establishing is that Lawrence's ideas about literature are sufficiently complex to require serious study. Gordon demonstrates that Lawrence is not merely an impressionistic critic, that there is a recognizable pattern in Lawrence's critical stance, and that the stance itself is relevant to the twentieth century. We cannot, for example, easily shrug off Lawrence's demands that "a critic must be emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in essential logic, and then morally very honest". Gordon conducts his examination of Lawrence within the following framework: The central focus is the critic's [Lawrence's] moral argument: its relation to aesthetic judgment and theory, its sensitivity to unconscious meanings, and its pervasive prophetic intention. The unifying theme, loosely woven throughout, may be described as Lawrence in the Romantic tradition.9 With scholarly precision, Gordon assembles an impressive body of Lawrence's criticism and provides an interesting and lucid exposition of Lawrence's literary opinions. He clears up the popular misconceptions about Lawrence's scorn for the intellect; and he sets the record straight on the much abused Lawrencean dictum "art for my sake" by pointing out that, in context, it refers only to Lawrence's "own procedure in composition" rather than to his attitude towards all art. Gordon sees Lawrence's quarrel with the traditional conception of tragedy as a quarrel which inevitably led Lawrence to a conception of art more accurately described as "apocalyptic or visionary rather than tragic". Apocalyptic art, Gordon points out, "seeks to impose itself as the whole truth, the only truth"; and the most "disturbing feature of apocalypse is its lack of humility". It is the • David J. Gordon, D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic (London and New Haven, Yale University Press, 1966), 16.

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magnitude of Lawrence's ambition - to reveal the whole truth which results in some degree of failure not only in his fiction but in his criticism as well. Lawrence's shortcomings do not disturb Gordon (and I think rightly so); the significant feature of Lawrence's literary criticism is its insistence on the "whole truth", its lack of compromise, and, finally, its incapacity to be sidetracked into aesthetic considerations without moral relevance. As a critic Lawrence was able to accommodate the "twentieth century literature of repudiation" but he could not, and did not accept "the twentieth century literature of negation". "Lawrence is the kind of critic", says Gordon, "whose need is to reveal rather than point out, and who is therefore best when he is excited enough to work in depth." And it is this fact that accounts for Lawrence's chief distinction as a literary critic, for he possessed an incomparable "gift for detecting psychological undercurrents and hidden biases" in the works which he examined. Although he is aware of Lawrence's reactions to the Russians, particularly to the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Gordon does not dwell at any length on this aspect of Lawrence's criticism. There is no attempt to account for Lawrence's high regard for V. V. Rozanov; in fact, this Russian is not mentioned in the course of the study, although the Appendix lists Lawrence's reviews of Rozanov's two books. Gordon is more concerned with determining the universality of Lawrence's criticism and with stating the principles on which it is based than he is with describing the quality of Lawrence's response to any single writer. Yet what emerges from my examination of Lawrence's critical response to the Russians is that Lawrence is as unique a critic as he is a writer; it is simply impossible to box him in, to put a stamp of conformity on him. Those readers who want an impartial critical assessment of Tolstoy's or Dostoevsky's art will find little to satisfy them in Lawrence; nor will readers who want a plot summary or a discussion of the techniques of characterization which the Russian novelists employ. The absence of these things in Lawrence's criticism need not be regretted; there are certainly critics, more than enough, who can and have supplied the deficiency. But where else can we find so vivid a response to Russian literature as Lawrence's? We have to agree with what Gamini

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Salgado says: "What a writer has to say about writing is nearly always worth listening to, and when that writer happens to be one of the outstanding artists of our time, the importance of his criticism is indisputable, however little it may have to do with its supposed "subject"". 10 Were there only a critical dimension in Lawrence's response to Russian literature, we might be justified in minimizing the significance of his reading of the Russians in the development of Lawrence as a writer. Henry Gifford has already noted, however, that "Lawrence came to self-realisation... in some part through wrestling with Tolstoy" and, as we pointed out in Chapter III, Raymond Williams has agreed that "Certainly Tolstoy's influence on Lawrence is important. Once we are given the beginning of the thread, we are surprised how far it leads us." I have tried to follow the thread even further. My study has, therefore, attempted to establish the existence of another dimension in Lawrence's response to the Russians, a dimension which I have called artistic as differentiated from critical. Being a great creative artist Lawrence could not help profiting from his reading of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Rozanov. Lawrence's own creative efforts are certainly to some extent richer owing to his reading of the Russians. The significant fact is that Lawrence was not awed into inarticulateness by the achievements of the Russian novelists; he did not, in short, lose faith in his own artistic abilities. He read the Russians, and he turned his reading of them to good account; he did not throw up his hands and say "What more can I do with the novel after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have had their crack at it?" He had confidence in the novel as an art form; and he knew that the English novel had not yet reached its zenith. John Middleton Murry could, if he liked, declare that an epoch had come to an end in Dostoevsky, or that Tchekhov would never be surpassed; Murry could bewail the fate of contemporary English and French novelists and declare that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had exploded the Victorian novel "by revealing its enormous potentialities" and that " a whole generation of promising

10

Gamini Salgado, "D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic", The London Magazine, VII (February, i960), 55.

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young souls in England and France lay buried under the ruins" ; n but these were not Lawrence's feelings about the Russians. If Tolstoy and Dostoevsky opened up the potentialities of the novel, Lawrence proceeded to take advantage of these potentialities. The salutary consequences f o r English fiction are abundantly manifest in Lawrence's own works. Part of my concern has been to establish the evidence for both Lawrence's familiarity with a large body of Russian literature and his intense interest in it. Without such evidence no attempt to describe Lawrence's response to the Russians could be made. The accumulation of this evidence has inevitably necessitated a thorough examination of Lawrence's correspondence as well as that of much of his other writing. If the maze through which the reader has been conducted has at times seemed tedious, the portrait of Lawrence which emerges in this study should help in some measure to compensate him for putting up with the tediousness. The insight which Lawrence's response to Russian literature provides into Lawrence as an artist proves again that he was indeed a genius with whom to reckon. His "independence of judgement" in his criticism of the Russians, indeed, "often becomes eccentricity", but it does not melt "into mushiness and an eagerness to detect non-existent virtues", although at times " a genuine insight into a writer's limitations is transformed into a blind-spot regarding his achievement". But as the critic, whose words I have re-arranged, says: "Without this furious egocentric energy, Lawrence might have been the greatest literary critic of our time - but he would certainly not have been D . H. Lawrence." 1 2 In Lawrence's critical response to the Russians there are, indeed, "blind-spots", but in his artistic response there is an unerring use of knowledge he gained from the Russians which, along with his other creative gifts, Lawrence's artistic imagination converted into the enduring fabric of literary art. And because, when one approaches a writer of the stature that D. H. Lawrence has now 11

See John Middleton Murry, "The Break-up of the Novel" in Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism (London, W. Collins Sons and Co., Ltd., 1924), 136. Gamini Salgado, op. cit., 57.

12

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achieved, what goes into the making of a work of art is nearly as interesting as the work of art itself, an attempt to discover the part played by the Russians in Lawrence's achievement is a subject that cannot help being stimulating.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

Aldington, Richard, D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius But... (New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950). Andreyev, Leonid, And It Came to Pass That the King Was Dead (London, Daniel, 1921). , His Excellency the Governor {London, Daniel, 1921). , To the Stars: A Drama (London, Plays for a People's Theatre, Number 10, 1921). , Lazarus, and Bunin, Ivan, The Gentleman from San Francisco (Boston, The Stratford Company, Publishers, 1918). Arnold, Armin, "In the Footsteps of D. H. Lawrence in Switzerland: Some New Biographical Material", TSLL, III (1961), 184-188. , "D. H. Lawrence, the Russians, and Giovanni Verga", CLS, II, No. 3 (1965), 249-257. Beebe, Maurice, and Tommasi, Anthony, "Criticism of D. H. Lawrence: A Selected Checklist with an Index to Studies of Separate Works", MFS, V (Spring 1959), 83-98. Bennett, Arnold, Books and Persons (London, Chatto and Windus, 1920). , The Savour of Life: Essays in Gusto (New York, Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc., 1928). Blackstone, Bernard, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1949). Brewster, Dorothy, East- West Passage: A Study in Literary Relationships (London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1954). Bunin, Ivan, "The Gentleman from San Francisco", translated by S. S. Koteliansky and D. H. Lawrence, The Dial (January 1922), 47-68. Bunin, I. A., The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf. [The first story in this book, "The Gentleman from San Francisco", is translated by D. H. Lawrence and S. S. Koteliansky. Owing to a mistake Mr. Lawrence's name was omitted from the title-page. The three other stories are translated by Mr. Koteliansky and Mr. Woolf.] (Richmond, Hogarth Press, 1922). , The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, translated from the Russian by D. H. Lawrence, S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (New York, Thomas Seltzer, 1923). Bynner, Witter, Journey with Genius (London, Peter Nevill Ltd., 1953). Cecchetti, Giovanni, "Verga and D. H. Lawrence's Translations", Comparative

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Literature, IX (1959). 333-344Chekhov, A. P., Rothschild's Fiddle and Other Stories (Modern Library of World's Best Books; New York, Boni and Liveright, n. d.). , The Bet and Other Stories, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and J. M. Murry (London and Dublin, Maunsel and Co., 1915). , The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Gilbert Cannan (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917). , My Life and Other Stories, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Gilbert Cannan (London, C. W. Daniel, 1920). , The Note-Books of Anton Tchekhov Together with Reminiscences of Tchekhov by Maxim Gorky, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (Richmond, Hogarth Press, 1921). , The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov [With portraits and biographical memoirs by E. G. Zamyatin and M. P. Chekhov], translated and edited by S. S. Koteliansky and Philip Tomlinson (London, Cassell and Co., 1925). , The Wood Demon: A Comedy in Four Acts, translated by S. S. Koteliansky (London, Chatto and Windus, 1926). , Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences [Unpublished works of Chekhov, together with miscellaneous essays and reminiscences by various authors], translated and edited by S. S. Koteliansky [With a portrait] (London, G. Routledgeand Sons, 1927). —, Plays and Stories, translated by S. S. Koteliansky (London, J. M. Dent and Sons [Everyman's Library], 1937). , Three Plays [The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, The Wood Demon], translated by S. S. Koteliansky (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books Ltd., 1940). —, The Lady with the Toy Dog, and Gooseberries, translated by S. S. Kotelansky (London, Todd Publishing Co. [Polybooks], 1943). Chesterton, G. K., Perris, G. H., and Garnett, E., Leo Tolstoy (London, Hodder and Stroughton, 1903). Q ark, L. D., The Dark Night of the Body: D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1964). Corke, Helen, "D. H. Lawrence as I Saw Him", Renaissance and Modem Studies, IV (i960), 5-13. Daleski, H. M., "The Duality of Lawrence", Modern Fiction Studies, V (Spring 1959). 3-i8. —, The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London, Faber and Faber, 1965)Davie, Donald, ed., Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1965). de Casseres, Benjamin, "Shestov's Challenge to Civilization", New York Times Book Review and Magazine (3 October 1920). Dostoevskaya, A. G., Dostoevsky Portrayed by his Wife: The Diary and Reminiscences of Mme. Dostoevsky, translated from the Russian and edited by S. S. Koteliansky (London, G. Routledge and Sons, 1926). Dostoevsky. F. M., An Honest Thief and Other Stories, translated by Constance Garnett (London; William Heinemann Ltd., 1957). , The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett with an introduction by Edward Garnett. 2 vols. (Everyman Library, first published in this edition 1927; London, J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1957).

180

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, The Brothers Karamazov, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett (Modern Library edition; New York, Random House, n. d.). , Crime and Punishment, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett (Modern Library edition; New York: Random House, 1950). , The Idiot, translated by Eva M. Martin (Everyman Library; London, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1934). , Letters from the Underworld, The Gentle Maiden, The Landlady, translated with an introduction by C. J. Hogarth (Everyman Library; London, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1957). , The Possessed, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett, with a foreword by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (Modern Library edition; New York, Random House, 1936). , Pages from the Journal of an Author, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry (London, Maunsel and Co., 1916). , Stavrogin's Confession [Three hitherto unpublished chapters of the novel The Possessed and the plan of The Life of a Great Sinner], translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (Richmond, Hogarth Press, 1922). , Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences, translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry (London, Chatto and Windus, I923), "New Dostoevsky Letters", translated and edited by S. S. Koteliansky, Virginia Quarterly Review, II (July-October, 1926), 375-384; 546-556. , New Dostoevsky Letters, translated by S. S. Koteliansky (London, The Mandrake Press, 1929). , The Grand Inquisitor [Book V, Part III, Chapter V of The Brothers Karamazov], translated by S. S. Koteliansky with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence (London, Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1930). , Stavrogin's Confession, translated by Virginia Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky with a psychoanalytic study by Sigmund Freud (New York, Lear Publishers, 1947). E. T. (Jessie Chambers), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, Second edition, edited by J. D. Chambers (New York, Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1965). Ettlinger, Amrei, and Gladstone, Joan M., Russian Literature Theatre and Art: A Bibliography of Works in English, Published ¡900-1945 (London, Hutchinson and Co., Ltd., 1945). Frank, S. L. (arr.), A Solovyov Anthology, translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddington (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950). Garnett, David, " A Whole Hive of Genius", Saturday Review of Literature (1 October 1932), 141-142. Garnett, Edward, Tolstoy: His Life and Writings (London, Constable and Co., Ltd., 1914). Gifford, Henry, "Anna, Lawrence and "The Law"", Critical Quarterly, I (Autumn 1959), 203-206. , "Further Notes on Anna Karenina", Critical Quarterly, II (Summer i960), 158-160. Goldenveizer, A. B., Talks with Tolstoi [Selected from 'vblizi Tolstova'], translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (Richmond, Hogarth Press, 1923). Goodheart, Eugene, "Lawrence and Christ", The Partisan Review, X X X I (Win-

B I B L I O G R A P H Y OF W O R K S CITED

l8l

ter 1964), 42-59. —,

The Utopian Vision ofD. H. Lawrence (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1963). Gordon, David J., " D . H. Lawrence's Quarrel with Tragedy", Perspective, XIII (Winter 1964), 135-150. —, D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic (London and New Haven, Yale University Press, 1966). Gorky, M. (A. M. Pieshkov), Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, authorized translation by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (Richmond, Hogarth Press, 1920). —, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov [By Maxim Gorky, Alexander Kuprin and I. A. Bunin], translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (New York, B. W. Huebsch, Inc., 1921). — , "Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev", translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and Katherine Mansfield, The Dial (June 1924, 481-492; July 1924, 31-43; August 1924,105-120). — , "Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev", The Adelphi (February 1924, 806820; March 1924,892-905; April 1924,983-989). —, Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev, authorized translation by K. Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky (London, William Heinemann, 1931). —, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev, authorized translation by K . Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (London, Hogarth Press, 1934). [Compass Books edition issued in 1959 by the Viking Press, Inc.] Gransden, K. W., "Rananim: D. H. Lawrence's Letters to S. S. Koteliansky", Twentieth Century, CLIX (January 1956), 22-32. — , "The S. S. Koteliansky Bequest", British Museum Quarterly, X X (1956), 153-163. Hippius, Zinaida, N., (See Merezhkovskaya). Ivask, George, "Rozanov", The Slavic and East European Journal, New Series, vol. V (XIX), No. 2. (Fall 1961), 110-122. Koteliansky, Samuel Solomonovich, [All items which are translations done by Koteliansky are entered under the name of the author of the original work. See: Bunin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Kuprin, Merezhkovskaya, Rozanov, Shestov, Tolstoy.] Koteliansky, S. S., Russian Short Stories [Selected by S. S. Koteliansky] (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books Ltd., 1941). Kuprin, I. A., The River of Life and Other Stories, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and J. M. Murry (Boston, Luce, 1916). Lavrin, Janko, Aspects of Modernism, from Wilde to Pirandello (London, Stanley Nott, 1935). Lawrence, David Herbert, The Letters, edited and with an introduction by Aldus Huxley (London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1932). —, The Collected Letters, edited with an introduction by Harry T. Moore, 2 vols. (New York, Viking Press, 1962). —, The Quest for Rananim: D. H. Lawrence,s Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, edited with an introduction by George J. Zytaruk (Montreal, McGill Queens University Press, 1970). —, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, collected and edited with an intro-

B I B L I O G R A P H Y OF W O R K S

CITED

duction and notes by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, 2 vols. (New York, Viking Press, 1964). , Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers, edited with an introduction by Edward D. McDonald (New York, Viking Press, 1936). , Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Phoenix edition; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1961). , Lady Chatterley'sLover (New York, Grove Press, Inc., 1959). , The Rainbow (London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1955). , Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays (First Midland Book edition; Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1963). , Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Anthony Beal (New York, Viking Press, 1956). , Sex, Literature and Censorship, Essays, edited by Harry T. Moore (New York, Twayne Publishers, 1953). , The Short Novels, 2 vols. (Phoenix edition; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1963). , Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, Viking Press, 1964). , The Symbolic Meaning (The Uncollected Versions of Studies in Classic American Literature) edited by Armin Arnold with a preface by Harry T. Moore (New York, Viking Press, 1964). , Women in Love (Phoenix edition; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1954). Lea, F. A., The Life of John Middleton Murry (London, Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1959). Leavis, F. R., D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London, Chatto and Windus, 1955). , "Anna Karenina" and Other Essays (London, Chatto and Windus, 1967). Mackenzie, Compton, Literature in My Time (New York, Loring and Mussey, 1933). Mansfield, Katherine, The Journal, edited by J. Middleton Murry (Definitive edition; London, Constable and Company, Ltd., 1954). Maud, Ralph N., "D. H. Lawrence: True Emotion as the Ethical Control in Art", Western Humanities Review, IX (1955), 233-240. Mayne, E. C., Letters of Fyodor Michailovich Dostoevsky to His Family and Friends (London, Chatto and Windus, 1914). McDonald, Edward D., A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence (Philadelphia, Centaur Book Shop, 1925). , The Writings of D. H. Lawrence, I925-1930: A Bibliographical Supplement (Philadelphia, The Centaur Book Shop, 1931). Merejkowski, Dmitri, The Death of the Gods, translated from the Russian by Bernard Guilbert Guerney (London, Modern Library, 1929). , Peter and Alexis, translated from the Russian by Bernard Guilbert Guerney (London, Modern Library, 1931). , The Romance ofLeonardo da Vinci, translated from the Russian by Bernard Guilbert Guerney (London, Modern Library, 1928). , Tolstoi as Man and Artist (Westminster, Archibald Constable and Co., Ltd., 1902). Merezhkovskaya, Zinaida, N. (née Hippius), The Green Ring [A play], translated by S. S. Koteliansky (London, C. W. Daniel, 1920). Mill, J. S., Autobiography (New York, Columbia University Press, 1948).

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

183

Mirsky, Dmitri, The Intelligentsia of Great Britain, translated by Alec Brown (New York, Covici Friede Publishers, 1935). Mirsky, Prince D. S., Contemporary Russian Literature 1881-1925 (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926). Moore, Harry T. (ed.), A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany (London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1961). —, The Intelligent Heart: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (New York, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954). —, The Life and Works ofD. H. Lawrence (ist ed.; London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1951). —, Poste Restante: A Lawrence Travel Calendar, with an introduction by Mark Schorer (University of California Press, 1956). Moynahan, Julian, The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1963). Muchnic, Helen, Dostoevsky's English Reputation, 1881-1936 ("Smith College Studies in Modern Languages", XX [Northampton, Mass., April and July, 1939])Murry, J. M., Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism (London, W. Collins Sons and Co., Ltd., 1924). —, Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study (London, Martin Seeker, n. d.). — , "The Living Dead - 1 : D. H. Lawrence", The London Magazine, III (May 1956), 57-63—, Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence (The Life and Letters Series No. 74). (London, Jonathan Cape, 1936). Nehls, Edward, D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols. (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1957,1958,1959). Orel, Harold, "Victorians and the Russian Novel: A Bibliography", Bulletin of Bibliography (January-April, 1954), 61-81. Ouspensky, P. D., Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought: A Key to the Enigmas of the World, translated from the Russian by Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragadon (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1920). Panichas, George A., Adventure in Consciousness: The Meaning of D. H. Lawrence's Religious Quest (The Hague, Mouton and Company, 1964). Phelps, Gilbert, The Russian Novel in English Fiction (London, Hutchinson's University Library, 1956). Pinto, Vivian de Sola, "D. H. Lawrence: Letter Writer and Craftsman in Verse", Renaissance and Modern Studies, I (1957), 5-39. Poggioli, Renato, "On the Works and Thoughts of Vasili Rozanov", Symposium, IV (November 1950). —, The Phoenix and the Spider (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1957)Roberts, Warren, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (Soho Bibliographies) (London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963). Rozanov, V. V., Solitaria [With an abridged account of the Author's life by E. Gollerbach. Other biographical material and matter from "The Apocalypse of Our Times"], translated by S. S. Koteliansky (London, Wishart and Co., 1927). —, Fallen Leaves [Bundle One], translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky with a foreword by James Stephens (London, The Mandrake Press, 1929).

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED Saigado, Gamini, "D. H. Lawrence as Literary Critic", The London Magazine, VII (February i960), 49-57. Shestov, Leo [Lev Isaakovich Schwartzman], All Things Are Possible, translated by S. S. Koteliansky with a foreword by D. H. Lawrence (London, Martin Seeker, 1920). Shestov, Leon [Lev Isaakovich Schwartzman], Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays, translated by S. S. Koteliansky with a foreword by J. M. Murry (London, Maunsel and Co., 1916). Slonim, Marc, An Outline of Russian Literature (New York, The New American Library, 1959). , Modern Russian Literature (Oxford University Press, 1953). Soloviev, Vladimir S., War, Progress and the End of History: Including a Short Story of the Antichrist, translated from the Russian by Alexander Bakshy, with a biographical notice by Dr. Hagberg Wright (London, University Press, 1915)Stammler, Heinrich, "Apocalyptic Speculations in the Works of D. H. Lawrence and V. V. Rozanov", Die Welt Du Slaven, IV (1959), 66-73. Steiner, George, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (Vintage books ; New York : Random House, 1961). Swinnerton, Frank, The Georgian Literary Scene 1910-1935 (New York, Farrar, Straus and Company, Inc., n. d.). Tedlock, E. W. Jr., "D. H. Lawrence's Annotations of Ouspensky's Tertium Organum", TSLL, II (i960), 206-218. , D. H. Lawrence: Artist and Rebel: A Study of Lawrence's Fiction (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1963). , The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts: A Descriptive Bibliography, with a foreword by Frieda Lawrence (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1948). , (ed.), Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1964). Tindall, William York, D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York, Columbia University Press, 1939). Tiverton, Father William [Martin Jarrett-Kerr], D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (New York, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1951). Tolstaya, Sofiya, A., The Autobiography of Countess Sophie Tolstoi, with a Preface and Notes by Vasilli Spiridonov, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (Richmond, Hogarth Press, 1922). Tolstoi, Count Leo, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, translated by Benj. R. Tucker (New York, J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Company, 1890). , War and Peace, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett (Modern Library edition ; New York, Random House, n. d.). Tolstoy, Count Ilya, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, translated by George Calderon (New York, The Century Company, 1914). Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina, 2 vols., translated by Constance Garnett (New York, Random House, 1939). , Resurrection, translated by Mrs. Louise Maude (New York, Grosset and Dunlap, 1927). Tolstoy, L. N., Tolstoi's Love Letters (to Valerya Arseneva) [With a study of the autobiographical elements in Tolstoi's work by Paul Biruykov], translated

B I B L I O G R A P H Y OF W O R K S C I T E D

185

by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (Richmond, L. and V. Woolf, 1923). —, Notes of a Madman and Other Stories, translated by S. S. Koteliansky (London, Todd Publishing Co. [Polybooks], 1943). Wasiolek, Edward, " A Classic Maimed: A Translation of Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco" Examined", College English, X X (1958), 25-28. , Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., The M. I. T . Press, 1964). White, William, D. H. Lawrence: A Checklist. Writings about D. H. Lawrence, 1931-1950 (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1950). Widmer, Kingsley, The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence's Shorter Fictions (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1962). Williams, Raymond, "Lawrence and Tolstoy", Critical Quarterly, II (Spring i960), 33-39— , "Tolstoy, Lawrence and Tragedy", Kenyon Review, X X V (Autumn 1963), 633-650. Woolf, Leonard, " K o t " , The New Statesman and Nation, vol. 49 (5 February 1955), 170-172. —, Autobiography: Downhill All the Way (London, Hogarth Press, 1967). Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader (First and Second Series Combined in One Volume) (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1948). —, The Moment and Other Essays (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1948). Zernov, Nicolas, Three Russian Prophets: Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev (London, S. C. M. Press, 1944). Zytaruk, George J., "S. S. Koteliansky's Translations of Russian Works into English", The Bulletin of Bibliography and Magazine Notes, X X V , No. 3 (May-August), 65-66. — , "The Phallic Vision: D. H. Lawrence and V. V. Rozanov", CLS, IV, No. 3 (1967), 283-297. — , " D . H. Lawrence's Reading of Russian Literature", The D. H. Lawrence Review, II, No. 2 (1969), 120-37.

INDEX

Adelphi, The, 56,57,59 Adventure in Consciousness: The Meaning of D. H. Lawrence's Religious Quest, 133,142,151 Akhnaton, King of Egypt, 31 A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 109 Aldington, Richard, 31,66 All Things Are Possible (Shestov), 34, 38,47-49,51,61-62,157 Anderson, Sherwood, 63 And It Came to Pass That the King Was Dead, 28 Andreyev, Leonid, 28,52 An Honest Thief and Other Stories, 22 Anna Karenina, 14, 16, 18, 36, 65, 6773, 75, 81, 84-87, 89, 95-96, 102; relationship to Lady Chatterley's Lover, 72; 'no difficulty in it'; 85; poetic justice, 93 *Anna Karenina: Thought and Significance in a Great Creative Work', 73-74 "Anna, Lawrence and 'The Law'", 67 Anti-Christ, The, 31 Anton Chekhov and Other Essays (Shestov), 34,44,48,62 L'Apocalypse de notre temps précédé de Esseulment (Rozanov), 35 Apocalypse of Our Times, 150-51,155, 161-62 "Apocalyptic Speculations in the Works of D. H. Lawrence and V. V. Rozanov', 35,149-50 Apotheosis of Groundlessness, 48, 50 "Apropos ofLady Chatterley's Lover" 167

Aristotle, 162 art: "complex idea in symbols", 121 artist-"never trust", 88 "Art of Fiction", 109 Art ofPerversity, 151-52 art speech (art-utterance), 121; prevaricates so terribly", 127 Artsybashev, M. P., 28, 29, 63, 127 art symbology, 123 Aspects of Modernism, from Wilde to Pirandello, 35,145 Autobiography (J. S. Mill), 78 Autobiography: Downhill All The Way (Woolf), 45 Autobiography of Countess Sophie Tolstoi, 17,46 Bakshy, Alexander, 32 Baudelaire, 14 Bennett, Arnold, 106, n o , 112; "twelve greatest novels", 36; enthusiasm for the Russians, I I O - I I ; first reading of Brothers Karamazov, IIO-II

Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 67 Bernard of Clairvaux, 122 Bessaraboff, Nicholas, 33 Bet and Other Stories, The, 25,44 Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 38, 49,54,159 Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence, 54 Birth of the Gods, 31 Blavatsky, Madame, 31 Books and Persons, in Bracelet of Garnets, 29

INDEX

Bragadon, Claude, 33 Brangwen, Anna, resemblance to Tolstoy's Dolly, 96 Brangwen, Ursula, 73, 96; compared to Anna Karenina, 97-98 ; and Skrebensky, 99-101 "Break-up of the Novel", 176 Brett, Dorothy, 13,40 Brewster, Dorothy, 36 Brewster, Earl, 135, 159; and the origin of The Escaped Cock, 159 British Museum Quarterly, 42 Brothers Karamazov, 16, 21-23, 60, 104, 107-09, m - 1 3 , 119, 125, 128, 131,135,138,143 Bulletin of Bibliography and Magazine Notes, 36, 38 Bunin, Ivan, 26-28,46,59,61 Bynner, Witter, 13,15,43 Calderon, George, 18 Calendar of Modern Letters, 144,154 Calvinism, 122 Campbell, Gordon, 20 Cannan, Gilbert, 25,29,42,44,62 "Captain Ribnikov", 29 Carswell, Catherine, 13, 23, 36,40,47 Carter, Frederick, 151 Catholic church, 131 Cavelleria Rusticana, 26,68,85 Cecchetti, Giovanni, 39 Ceylon, 54,61 Cézanne, 19 Chambers, Jessie, 14,24-25,27,42 Chambers, May, 16,81 charity, "becomes pernicious", 127 Chartreuse de Parme, 111 Chekhov, Anton, 25-27, 31, 37, 44, 47, 63, 126-27, 153-54. 175; and Katherine Mansfield, 113; "a pet of Murry and Katharine", 154 Chesterton, G.K., 20 Christ and Anti-Christ, 31 Christ, as the Saviour, 136; Dostoievsky's portrayal, 136-38 ; and the phallic cults, 147; resurrection, 164 Christian brotherhood, 91

I87

Christian Church, 122,141 Christian myth, 165 Christian religion and the State, 128 Christianity, 130, 138, 151, 163; and African sects, 122; ideal but impossible, 129; Rozanov's criticism, 160 collectivity, 79 Common Reader, 108 Comrades, 27 consummation : spiritual and sensual, 116 Contemporary Russian Literature, 62, 152 Cooper, Fenimore, 24,122 Corbin, Alice, 61 Corke, Helen, 14,24 Cornwall, 121 Crime and Punishment, 16, 20, 36, 81, 112,119,133 critic's function, 87-88 "Criticism as Rage: D. H. Lawrence", 171 "Crown, The", 116, 121; and Lawrence's first statement on Dostoevsky, 115 Croydon, 14 Dana, Richard Henry, 63, 120,127 Dark Night of the Body, 151 Davidson Road School, 26 Dead Souls, 29 Death of the Gods, 31 de Casseres, Benjamin, 51 December the Fourteenth, 31 de Crevecoeur, Hector St. John, 122 Deed ofLife, 151,167 Deerslayer, 23,120 Dekker, E. D., 29 determinism in Anna Karenina, 94 Dial, The, 52-53,56-59 Dickens, Charles, 120 Die Welt Du Slaven, 35 Dimmesdale, Arthur, 123-25 Dostoevsky, F. M., 13, 15-17, 20-22, 24-25. 31. 37-38, 46, 59, 61, 63, 75, 104, 120-21, 126-27, 132, 138, 169-

i88

INDEX

70, 174, 176; a twentieth century phenomenon, 104; and sensuality, 117-18, 124; perspicacity mixed with perversity, 129; "a marvellous seer". 133; compared with Rozanov, 155 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: A Critical Study, 113-16 "Dostoevsky and Lawrence: Their Visions of Evil", 133 "Dostoevsky cult", 104,106 Dostoevsky: Letters and Reminiscences, 17,22-23 Dostoevsky, F. M.: The Major Fiction, 129-30 Dostoevsky Portrayed by His Wife: The Diary and Reminiscences of Mme. Dostoevsky, 23 "Dostoevsky's English Reputation (1881-1936)", 105,118 "Dream of a Queer Fellow", 22,120 "Dream of a Ridiculous Man", 22 Dream of Chang, 28 doctrine of individuality, 78-81,125 Double Measure, 151 Duddington, Natalie A., 33 Duel, The, 29 Early Greek Philosphers, 120 East- West Passage, 36 Ebersteinburg, 26 Egyptians, and resurrection, 164 Elaghin Affair, 28 Elements of Individualism, 78 Eliot, George, 67 Eliot, T. S.,42,170 Engelberg, Edward, 99 English Review, The, 24,49,121 "Escaped Cock", 147, 159-61; see also Man Who Died Ettlinger, Amrei, 36 European Quarterly, 145 Everyman, 35 Everyman Library, 21 Fallen Leaves, 27-28, 30, 34-35, 60, 127,147,151-53,157-58

Fanfrolico Press, 157 Fantasia of the Unconscious, 68,79 Fathers and Sons, 24 Fillipovna, Nastasya, 118,124 flame, a central image in Lawrence, 88-89 Flaubert, 14,24 Foma Gordyeef, 27 Fontana Vecchia (Taormina), 54 Forerunner, 31 Forked Flame, 151 Forster, E. M., 42 Forum, 159 Fry, Roger, 19 Fumeursd'Opium, 17 Galileo, 74,88 Galsworthy, John, 36 Gamett, Constance, 22,24-26,29,104 Garnett, David, 66 Garnett, Edward, 20, 24-25, 27, 31, 95-96,106-08 Geller, Beila, 41 "Gentleman from San Francisco", 27, 46,51-53,61 "Gentleman from San Francisco" and Other Stories, 28 "Gentle Maiden", 21 Georgian Literary Scene, 108 Gertler, Mark, 42-43 Gifford, Henry, 67,175 Gladstone, Joan M., 36 Glenavy, Beatrice Lady, 42-43 Gods Resurgent, The, 31 Gogol, 28-29,58 Goldenveizer, A . B., 17 Gorkey, Maxim, 19, 25, 27, 29, 37, 45-46,56,59,61 Graham, Stephen, 33 Grand Inquisitor, The, 16, 21, 23, 38, 59-61,115,132,138-39; Lawrence's interpretation, 128-33; concept of society, 131-32 ; Lawrence's preface, 21,128 Gransden, K . W., 42,60 Green Ring, The, 30 Guerney, B., 28-30

INDEX

Hapgood, Isabel, 24,28 Hardy, Thomas, 24, 83, 85, 170; compared with Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Tolstoy, 82 Harrison, Austin, 49 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 63,127 "Nathaniel Hawthorne I", 123 "Nathaniel Hawthorne II", 124 Hedgehog and the Fox, 67 Henderson, Mrs. William Penhallow, 60,61 Heseltine, Philip, 42 Hilton, Enid, 160 Hippius, Zinaida Nikoleavna, 30 His Excellency the Governor, 28 Hodgson, Ralph, 42 Hogarth Press, 45,53,56 Homer, 21 Home, 43 Hotel Krone (Ebersteinburg), 54 House of the Dead, The, 20,112,118 House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories, 25,44 Huebsch, W. B., 50-51 Ibsen,14 Idiot, The, 21-22,112-13,118,124,126 I Malavoglia (Verga), 47 immortality, 162 Individualist, The, 27 individuality, 77-81,130,140,165 Inquisition, Spanish, 122 Intelligent Heart, 38,135,148,153 Intelligentsia of Great Britain, 104 International Book Review, 55 Ippolit, 124,126 Isaiah, 41 Isis, 141 Ivanovich, Makar, 135 Ivanovitch, Sergey, 101 Jaffe, Else, 85 James, Henry, 36,67,74 Jarrett-Kerr, Martin (see Tiverton) Jennings, Blanche, 16,81 Jeremiah, 41 Job, 41

"Job, Book of", 20 Journal of Katherine Mansfield, 113 Journey With Genius, 15,43 Julian the Apostate, 30 Justification of the Good: An Essay in Moral Philosophy, 33 Karamazov, Alyosha, 135 Karamazov, Dmitri, 116, 118-19, 122-24 Karamaxov, Fyodor, 118,123-24 Karamazov, Ivan, 128 Karenina, Anna, 82, 98,100; analysis of character, 96-97; and Vronsky, 82-83,86-87,92,94 Kiev, 42 Koteliansky, Arzum Shloima, 41 "Koteliansky Bequest", 42 Koteliansky Papers, 42 Koteliansky, Samuel Solomonovich (1880-1955), 16, 19, 21-22, 25-27, 29-32, 40, 147, 152, 157; sends Lawrence translations, 17; bibliography of his translations, 38; biographical information, 40-44; translations from the Russians, 44-62 Kreutzer Sonata, 17 Kuprin, Alexander, 26-27,29-30 Lady Chatterley's Lover, 34, 69-70,95, 103,147,156,166; the third version, 166 ; structure, 167 Lake District, 43 "Landlady, The", 21 Lavrin, Janko, 35,145,150 Lawrence, DavidHerbert(i885-i93o), learns Russian, 13, 39,40; Russians the greatest writers, 13-14; plans Russian journey, 13; reading of Russian writers: Chekhov, 25-27; Dostoevsky, 20-23; Gorky, 27; Kuprin, 29-30; Rozanov, 34*35; Shestov, 33-34Î Solovyov, 32-33; Tolstoy, 16-20; Turgenev, 23; ambivalent feelings about Russians, 21, 37; contrasts Russians with

190

INDEX

Cooper,23-24 ¡compared to Merezhkovsky, 30-32; compared to Solovyov, 33; admiration for Rozanov, 34; reaction against Shestov, 34; exasperation with English admirers of Russians, 37; translator of Russian literature, 38-63; translator of Italian, 39, 47; relations with S. S. Koteliansky, 40-43; 4647; collaborates with Kot on Shestov, 47-51; translates Bunin, 51-55; translates Gorky, 56-59; preface to "The Grand Inquisitor", 60; compared to Tolstoy, 64-66; on Tolstoy's perversity, 85; criticism of Dostoevsky, 115, 119; artistic responses to Dostoevsky, 132-43; response to Rozanov, 145-68; as a literary critic, 171-75; and Irving Babbitt, 171 D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, 14.24 D. H. Lawrence: Artist and Rebel, 151 D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic, 73,151.171-73 "D. H. Lawrence as I Saw Him", 14 D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence, 147-48 D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, 169 D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, 67,73,79 D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow, 31 "D. H. Lawrence, the Russians, and Giovanni Verga", 20 "Lawrence and Tolstoy", 69 " D . H. Lawrence's Quarrel with Tragedy",73 Lawrence, Frieda, 40, 75, 96; reading Anna Karenina, 95 Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence, 40 Frieda Lawrence Collection of D. H. Lawrence Manuscripts, 52,60,159 Lazarus, 52 Lea, F. A., 30 Leavis, F. R., 64, 67,73-74,79,170 Lensky, Lydia, 98 Leonardo da Vinci, 30

Letters from the Underworld, 20, 21, 112,118,124 Letters from the Underworld, The Gentle Maiden, The Landlady, 21 Letters of Fyodor Michailovich Dostoevsky to His Family and Friends, 21 Lhevinne, Isadore, 55 Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, 26 Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence, 66, 148 Life of John Middleton Murry, 30 Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences (Tchekhov), 26,153 Literature in My Time, 30 "Living Dead - I: D. H. Lawrence", 134 Loerke and Svidrigailov, 133 London Times Literary Supplement, 51 "Love Was Once a Little Boy", 78 Low, Barbara, 120 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 40 Luther, Martin, 122 Magnus, Maurice, 28 Man Who Died, 34,139,141,143,147, 160, 162-63, 166; compared with Grand Inquisitor, 134-43; genesis of, 135, 159; phallic implications, 139; relation to Solitaria, 158-68 Mandrake press, 157 Manhattan Transfer, 76 Mann, Mary, 14 Mansfield, Katherine, 23, 29-30, 4244,56-57,62,106,112-13 Mastro-don Gesualdo, 26,27,125-26 Maupassant, 14,24 Max Havelaar, 29 Mayne, E. C., 21 Melville, Herman, 63,120,127 Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, 28 Merezhkovsky, Dimitry, 29-31, 37, 97-89,116 metaphysic (theory of being), 76-81, 84 Mill, J. S.,78

INDEX

Miliin, Sarah Gertrude, 64,169 Millionaire, The, 29 Mirsky, D. S., 62,104,155 Mitya's Love, 28 "Modern Fiction", 108 Möhr, Max, 35,166 Moment and Other Essays, 109 Monroe, Harriet, 61 Moore, George, 36 Moore, Harry, T., 38,59,66 morality, 82-83,87 "Morality and the Novel", 75 Morrell, Lady Ottoline, 21-22,42 Muchnic, Helen, 104-06,118 Muir, Edwin, 55 Muishkin, Prince, 116,135,141 Murry, J. M., 22, 29-31, 37,40,42-44. 48,62,106-07,112-16,120,134, 175 Mackenzie, Compton, 30-31 McConald, Edward, 54 McLeod, A. W., 14 New Dostoevsky Letters, 23 New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 51 Notebooks of Anton Tchekhov, together with Reminiscences of Tchekhov by Maxim Gorky, 26 novel, theories of, 75-77, 80-81, 88, 120,125 "Novel, The", 17,19,75.78, 89 "Novel and the Feelings", 75 Novelle Rusticane, 26,47 Novels and Tales of Ivan Turgenev, 24 Old Testament, 41 Omoo, 120,127 "On Liberty", 78 Osiris, 141 Ostropol, 41 Ouspensky, P. D., 33 Outline of Russian Literature, 30, 35 "Overcoat, The", 58 Owen, Wilfred, 104 Pages from the Journal of an Author, 22,120

I9I

Pan, 149 Passos, John Dos, 76 Paul, Jean, 29 Penultimate Words and Other Essays, 48 Perspective, 73 Peter and Alexis, 30-31 phallic consciousness, 88, 139, 144, 148,155-56,163,165-66 Phelps, Gilbert, 36,104-05 Phoenix and the Spider (Poggioli), 35, 55,148-49 Pierre (in War and Peace), 90-91 Pilgrim fathers, 121 Pinkerton, Percy, 29 Poe, Edgar Allan, 63,123,127 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 61 Poggioli, Renato, 35, 55, 148-49. 167 Pollinger, Laurence, 159 Portrait of a Genius But..., 66,148 Possessed, The, 22,46,112-13,118 Primitive Culture, 120 "primordial creativity", 78 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscios,u Fantasia of the Unconscious, and Reflection on the Death of a Porcupine, 75 Puritanism, 122,146 Quest for Rananim: D. H. Lawrence's Letters to S. S. Koteliansky, 56, 152 Radford, Dollie, 20,120 Rainbow, The, 65, 69,72,95-96,98-99, 102-03,114 "Rananim: D. H. Lawrence's Letters to S. S. Koteliansky", 42,60 Raskolnikov, 123 Raw Youth, 135 Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, 17-19,78,87,115 relationships, human, 79,141 Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov by Maxim Gorky, 26-27 Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence, 112, 116-17 Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev, 56,

192

INDEX

61 Reminiscences ofLeo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, 19, 27,45 Reminiscences of Tolstoy, 18, 84 Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, 56 Renaissance and Modern Studies, 14, 133 Resurrection, 17,73,87,92-93 Resurrection of the Gods, 31 Richardson, Dorothy M., 42 River of Life, The, 29 Roberts, Warren, 38,49,54 Robertson, J. M., 16 Rogozhin, 116-18,124 Rota, Bertram, 38,59,154 Rozanov, V. V., 27-30, 34-35, 37, 60, 127, 144-46, 155, 157-58, 161, 16970, 174; 'a great man and a great seer", 34; Lawrence's Russian counterpart, 145; "greatest revelation of the Russian mind", 155-56 Rudin, 24 Russian Law Bureau, 43 Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction, 36,67 Russian Literature, Theatre and Art, 36 Russian Novel in English Fiction, 36, 105,118 "Russian Point of View", 108 "Russian Spirit", 33,48-49 Salaman, Mrs. Esther, 42 Salamanca, University of, 161 Salgado, Gamini, 175 Savage, Henry, 17 Savour ofLife, 111 Scarlet Letter, The, 124-25 Schopenhauer, 149 Schwartzman, Leo (see Shestov) Seccombe, Thomas, 105 Seeker, Martin, 49-51 Seelig, Carl, 63 Serbian War, 101 Sermon on the Mount, 127 "Sex and Eros", 35,146 Shaw, G. B., 42,104

Shestov, Leo, 30, 33-34, 37-38, 44, 47-49,50-53,59,61-62 Signature, Ute, 115 Sisters, The, 96 Skrebensky, Anton, 96,100-02 Slatkowsky, R. S., 43 Slavic and East European Journal, 167 Slonim, Marc, 30,32,35 Smith, P. F. T., 26 Solitaria (Rozanov), 34,127,144,147, 151-155,161-62,164,168 Solovyov, Vladimir, 30,32-33,37,118 Solovyov Anthology, 33 Sons and Lovers, 24,114,150 "Spirit of Place", 127 Sportsman's Sketches, 23 Spy, The, 27 Stammler, Heinrich, 35,150 St. Augustine, 160 Stavrogin's Confession, 46 Stendhal, h i Stephens, James, 42 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 36 St. Francis of Assisi, 122-23 St. Mawr, 69,103 Studies in Classic American Literature, 15,62,75,78,88,120,126 "Study of Thomas Hardy", 18, 75-76, 82,85,89 Sullivan, J. W.N., 42 "Surgery for the Novel - or a Bomb", 75 Svidrigailov, 118,123,133 Swift, Jonathan, 29 Swinburne, 120 Swinnerton, Frank, 107-08 Symbolic Meaning, The, 15, 24, 75, 121,124,171 Tales of Chekhov, 25 Talks with Tolstoy, 17 Taras Bulba, 29 Tedlock, E. W. Jr., 33,40,52 Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought: A Key to the Enigmas of the World (Ouspensky), 33 Three Men: A Novel, 27

INDEX

Three Russian Prophets: Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, 33 Thucydides, 120 Tindall, William York, 31 Tiverton, Father, 146-48,150 "Today We Will Only Gossip", 43 Tolstoi as Man and Artist, 97,116 Tolstoy, Count L. N., 13, 16-20, 2425, 37, 46, 63, 65, 75. 81, 83-84, 86, 88,92-93,125,127,169-70,174,176 Tolstoy: His Life and Writings, 20 "Tolstoy, Lawrence and Tragedy", 71 Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, 132 Tolstoy's Love Letters, 17 "Tolstoy's Place in European Literature", 20 Tomlinson, Philip, 44,62 To the Stars: A Drama, 28 Townsend, R. S., 24 Turgenev, Ivan, 13-14, 24-25, 36, 107-08,111 Turgenev (Garnett), 23 Twain, Mark, 29 Two Russian Reformers: Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, 24 Two Years Before the Mast, 120 Typee, 120,127

193

Virgin Soil, 24 Virginia Woolf: A Commentary, 109 Volhinia Province, 41 Volterra, 159,161 Vronsky, Count, 70, 75, 86, 89-90, 100-01

War and Christianity from the Russian Point of View: Three Conversations, 32 War and Peace, 16, 65, 71, 73, 81, 84, 87,90-91,109 War, Progress and the End of History: Including a Short History of the Antichrist, 32 Weiniger, Otto, 35,145-46 Wells, H. G.,42 Wells, Marjorie, 42 West Australia, 54 Westmorland, 44 "What is Art?", 19-20 Whitman, Walt, 63,125-26 "Why the Novel Matters", 75,88 Widmer, Kingsley, 151 Williams, Raymond, 67, 69, 94-95, 175 Women in Love, 65, 72, 96, 102, 114, 133 Woolf, Leonard, 19, 27, 41-42, 44-45, Ukraine, 41 53-55,62 Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence, 151 Woolf, Virginia, 31, 37, 42,44*46, 54, 62,106,108-09 Verga, Giovanni, 13,26, 39,61, 85-86, 125,170 Yama (The Pit), 30 "Verga and D. H. Lawrence's Trans- Yarmolinsky, Abraham, 51-52 lations", 39 Yeats, W. B., 42 Verlaine, 14 "Victorians and the Russian Novel: Zernov, Nicolas, 33 A Bibliography", 36 Zossima, Father, 119,122-23 Village, The, 28

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