Retelling Dostoyevsky: Literary Responses and Other Observations

Retelling Dostoyevsky studies the Russian author through recreations of his novels by nine twentieth-century writers deeply influenced by him. It examines ten individual novels-two by Joseph Conrad, the others by Richard Wright, Leonid Leonov, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernard Mal-amud, David Storey, J. M. Coetzee, Frank Herbert, and Albert Camus. Half are versions of Crime and Punishment, the others are of The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. These retellings shed surprising light on the creative process of each of the novelists, and are valuable as highly imaginative, interpretive criticism of Dostoyevsky's novels as well. The study also deals with influence as a phenomenon. It identifies motives particular to each novelist for his creative re-use of Dostoyevsky, and explores theoretic approaches to the problem of influence through Mikhail Bakhtin and Harold Bloom.
This book also portrays Dostoyevsky's life, searching for his creative personality, and inevitably focusing on his extreme late-life anti-Semitism. The analysis of its part in Dostoyevsky's creative process serves as an introduction to the author's own fictional retelling of aspects of Karamazov. Adelman himself offers a post-Holocaust retelling, a command performance for the shade of Dostoyevsky in which the Russian encounters the Holocaust dead reliving their shame; meets prototypes of the Karamazov brothers in a new guise, one in which the old truths have no validity; is gradually drawn into a debate about the influence of his books and is put on trial.
Little that has been said about Dostoyevsky before is reiterated here. The Dostoyevsky of the twentieth century is very different from the Dostoyevsky of the nineteenth. Not one of the novelists, from Conrad in 1904 to J. M. Coetzee in 1994, is interested in his salvationist ideology. Only Camus grapples with his Christianity at all.
The book strikes at the heart of what fascinates readers about Dostoyevsky in a stunningly original way.