John Rodden: The Master of Petersburg and the Martyr of Style
Dostoevsky and Flaubert should be studied together as progenitors of the modern novel. The end of 2021 witnessed an unusual literary event: the bicentennials of two geniuses of modern fiction. They were arguably the leading novelists of their respective countries: the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11) and the Frenchman Gustave Flaubert (December 12). No conclusive biographical evidence exists that Dostoevsky ever read Madame Bovary (1857) or anything else by Flaubert. The reverse is certainly true: Flaubert knew no Russian, while Dostoevsky was little known in France until after he died in 1881, a year after Flaubert’s own death.
Still, the coincidence
of the bicentennial anniversaries of their births provides an occasion to
explore the fascinating similarities between the two writers within the
enormous continent of their differences. Otherwise, no one would ever think to
pair two authors so dissimilar as the punctilious, perfectionistic exemplar of
French prose and the chaotic, disordered genius of the Russian novel. Indeed:
not even the recent passing of their dual bicentennial prompted scholarly
reflection on their resemblances and dissimilitudes, which says as much about
academic overspecialization as it does about the two authors....
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-master-of-petersburg-and-the-martyr-of-style/
Madhavan Palat lectures on Dostoevsky
Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia
in Revolutionary Russia
Books reviewed: Solzhenitsyn as he saw
himself
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of
Decline and Prophet of Revival by Madhavan Palat
Ivan
Turgenev on Hamlet & Don Quixote / The madness in Hamlet & Don Quixote
Salman
Rushdie: how Cervantes and Shakespeare wrote the modern literary rule book
