![]() ![]() James held that Turgenev’s portraits of Russian serfs in his first book, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, for example, were superior to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin precisely because Turgenev makes his case through the “cumulative testimony of a multitude of fine touches.” James preferred Turgenev to both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but in praising the novelist for his delicacy and nuance at the expense of his ideas, he made him out to be merely an aesthete. ![]() Twentieth-century critics and novelists, following Henry James, have mostly viewed him as a master of portraiture and an exquisite stylist but lacking in intellectual heft. ![]() But the novel made him briefly the dean of Russian literature in the eyes of the West-until, that is, the publication of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867). The former felt the novel was too critical of young revolutionaries, and the latter that it was not critical enough. The Russian left and right both distrusted him after the publication of Fathers and Sons (1862). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |