Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Crystal Palace

  • Roger Chapman
Chapter
Part of the Postcolonialism and Religions book series (PCR)

Abstract

One cannot truly begin to understand Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) while remaining unaware that many of his literary undertakings constitute hostile reactions to the West. These reactions no doubt were heightened by his negative perceptions of the industrial exhibitions housed in and around London in 1851 and 1862. Dostoyevsky’s harsh critique of nineteenth-century globalization was in fact generated during his first tour of Western Europe, which included an eight-day visit to London at the time of the Great London Exposition of 1862. As a tourist, Dostoyevsky evidently viewed the Crystal Palace, the astonishing glass-and-iron edifice (expanded and transported to a new location) that had housed the 1851 fair, and there the novelist read meanings and sensed implications that severely contradicted his Russian values. The next year, in Russia, he published Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, in which he presented the Crystal Palace as a symbol of the controlling mechanism of utilitarian rationalism, a creation of Baal that would offer material abundance while demanding the sacrifice of spirit, autonomy, and authenticity. Dostoyevsky’s obsession with the symbol of the Crystal Palace was “henceforth to enter into everything he wrote.”1

Keywords

Real House Russian People Communist Manifesto Crystal Palace Utilitarian Rationalism 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 1.
    Kyril FitzLyon, preface to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. Kyril FitzLyon (London: Quartet Books, 1985), vi.Google Scholar
  2. 3.
    Olga Stuchebrukhov, The Nation as Invisible Protagonist in Dickens and Dostoevsky: Uncovering Hidden Social Forces within the Texts (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2006), 85.Google Scholar
  3. 4.
    Robert Lord, Dostoyevsky: Essays and Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 50–51.Google Scholar
  4. 5.
    Andrzej Walicki, History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 323.Google Scholar
  5. 6.
    Vyacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky (London: Harvill Press, 1952), 58.Google Scholar
  6. 7.
    Edward Hallett Carr, Dostoyevsky, 1821–1881 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962), 74.Google Scholar
  7. 8.
    See Priscilla Meyer and Stephen Rudy, eds., Dostoyevsky and Gogol: Texts and Criticism (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979).Google Scholar
  8. 9.
    Robert C. Williams, “The Russian Soul: A Study in European Thought and Non-European Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970), 581;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. C. R. Proffer, ed., Letters of Nikolai Gogol (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 154.Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein, eds., Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 174.Google Scholar
  11. 11.
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. David Patterson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 4.Google Scholar
  12. 12.
    Frank and Goldstein, Selected Letters, 174; Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation 1860–1865 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 234.Google Scholar
  13. 14.
    John Carroll, Break-out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 158.Google Scholar
  14. 15.
    Williams, “Russian Soul,” 578–579; Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev, Philosophical Letters & Apology of a Madman, trans. Mary-Barbara Zeldin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969).Google Scholar
  15. 17.
    Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. Richard Lee Renfield (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 89.Google Scholar
  16. 22.
    Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
  17. 23.
    Leonard De Vries, Panorama, 1842–1865: The World of the Early Victorians as Seen through the Eyes of the Illustrated London News (London: John Murray, 1967), 84.Google Scholar
  18. 24.
    John McKean, Crystal Palace: Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 40.Google Scholar
  19. 26.
    Christopher Hobhouse, 1851 and the Crystal Palace (London: Jon Murray, 1950), 72.Google Scholar
  20. 27.
    George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 3.Google Scholar
  21. 28.
    Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), 13, 15.Google Scholar
  22. 29.
    Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 251.Google Scholar
  23. 31.
    Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 1988), 153.Google Scholar
  24. 32.
    Patrick Beaver, The Crystal Palace, 1851–1936: A Portrait of Victorian Enterprise (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1970), 79, 83.Google Scholar
  25. 34.
    Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 237.Google Scholar
  26. 35.
    The following authors fail to differentiate the Great Exhibition from Sydenham: Walicki, History of Russian Thought, 312; Josef Konvitz, The Urban Millennium: The City-building Process from the Early Middle Ages to the Present (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 104;Google Scholar
  27. and Robert Muccigrosso, Celebrating the New World: Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 5.Google Scholar
  28. 37.
    David Patterson, introduction to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Winters Notes on Summer Travels, trans. David Patterson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), viii–ix.Google Scholar
  29. 39.
    Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1918), 380.Google Scholar
  30. 40.
    Yvonne ffrench, The Great Exhibition, 1851 (London: Harvill Press, 1950), 188.Google Scholar
  31. 41.
    C. R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and Its Fruits (London: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 40.Google Scholar
  32. 42.
    Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters (London: Viking, 1997), 324.Google Scholar
  33. 44.
    W. J. Leatherbarrow, Dostoevskii and Britain (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995), 7.Google Scholar
  34. 45.
    John Tallis, Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, vol. 1 (New York: J. Tallis, 1852), 127–130.Google Scholar
  35. 48.
    Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, vol. 3, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 1185.Google Scholar
  36. 50.
    Peter Sekirin, The Dostoevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries’ Memoirs and Rare Periodicals (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 145.Google Scholar
  37. 52.
    Aileen Kelly, Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekov, and Bakhtin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 223.Google Scholar
  38. 53.
    Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 145–148.Google Scholar
  39. 55.
    A. H. Layard, “The Crystal Palace,” Quarterly Review 97 (1885), 354.Google Scholar
  40. 56.
    Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? trans. Michael R. Katz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 369–370.Google Scholar
  41. 57.
    Andrew M. Drozd, Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? A Reevaluation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 165–170.Google Scholar
  42. 58.
    Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, eds. Nicholas A. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 147.Google Scholar
  43. 59.
    Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 159.Google Scholar
  44. 60.
    Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 283.Google Scholar
  45. 63.
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library, 1970), 21.Google Scholar
  46. 64.
    Drozd, Chernyshevskii’s, 15–16; Joseph Frank, “Nihilism and Notes from Underground,” Sewanee Review 69 (1961): 1–33.Google Scholar
  47. 65.
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Dover, 1992), 4, 16, 24.Google Scholar
  48. 68.
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Julius Katzer (Moscow: Raduga, 1985), 177.Google Scholar
  49. 69.
    Richard Peace, Dostoyevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 21.Google Scholar
  50. 71.
    Sekirin, Dostoevsky Archive, 161–162; William F. Woehrlin, Chernyshevskii: The Man and the Journalist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 116, 269; Frank, Dostoevsky, 151–155.Google Scholar
  51. 72.
    V. S. Pritchett, The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev (New York: Random House, 1977), 79.Google Scholar
  52. 73.
    Ivan Turgenev, The Best Known Works of Ivan Turgenev (New York: Book League of America, 1941), 203.Google Scholar
  53. 75.
    Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Turgenev: The Man, His Art, and His Age (New York: Orion, 1959), 254.Google Scholar
  54. 77.
    F. M. Dostoievsky, The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: George Braziller, 1954), 973–974.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Anne R. Richards and Iraj Omidvar 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Roger Chapman

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations