Tim Henderson to Siri Bendtsen:
Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted
by most readers as universal in both
scope and significance, is considered one of the
world's great authors. Yet you
have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and
vulgar." [...] Non-Russian readers do not realize two things:
that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and
that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an
artist.
JM: There's an
awful lot of not only Russians and Americans who deeply dislike in
Dostoevski. I refer you to Freud's 1927 article "Dostoevsky and Parricide" where
he writes: "Four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of
Doestoevsky: the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist and the sinner. How
is one to find one's way in this bewildering complexity? The creative artist is
the least doubtful: Doestoevsky's place is not far behind Shakespeare
[...] the episode of the Grand Inquisitor [The Brothers Karamasov], one
of the peaks in the literature of the world, can hardly be valued too highly.
Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its
arms. The moralist in Doestoevsky is the most readily assailable [...] He has
not achieved the essence of morality...he reminds one of the barbarians of the
great migrations, who murdered and did penance for it, till penance became
an actual technique for enabling murder to be done[...] he landed in the
retrograde position of submission both to a temporal and spiritual authority
[...] of a narrow Russian natiolaism [...]The future of human civilization will
have little to thank him for" ..
Susan Sontag (Where the Stress
Falls) in A Poet's Prose stresses the
romantic ideal according to which "poetry is a form of both language and
being: an ideal intensity, absolute candor, nobility, heroism".*
Perhaps VN's disparagement of TSEliot's entire oeuvre could be related to
this ideal that holds that all great poetry has to be produced by a
"great man."
*[ There is also a debatable observation by
Sontag: "In the twentieth century, writing poems tends to be a dalliance of
a prose writer's youth (Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov...) or an
activity assumed with the left hand ( Borges, Updike...).]