Twin Stars: The Anxiety of Sibling Rivalry between Literary Titans

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2004 by Weidhorn, Manfred

He thought Amelia a disappointment, an odd judgment considering his low estimation of Fielding's previous books! seeing many autobiographical touches in it, as well as in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, he notes that the disheveled and wanton subject matter is "all drawn from what he has seen and known." The conclusion is that "he has little or no invention.... he designed to be good, but knew not how, and lost his genius and low humor in the attempt" (Rogers 195).

He was, notes a critic, disgusted by the very strengths of the book-its picture of the corruption and perversity of society (Alter 172). Though he speaks of Fielding's "continual lowness," the problem is that the smug Richardson ignored the poverty and squalor that outraged Fielding and that prompted the latter to forward (in other writings) thoughtful remedial ideas (Rogers 207). Richardson was blaming the messenger. To Fielding, political rottenness and hypocrisy are far worse sins than sexual indiscretions.

If we were to apply the Sophoclean formula to these two writers, Richardson, at least in moral matters, is the idealist and Fielding the realist. The formula becomes more difficult to apply to the many other differences between them. Because of the modern desacralizing of sex and because of the attendant sexual revolution (a change more in attitude than in behavior), as well as because of the modern preference for irony, Fielding has been much more congenial to modern taste during the past century. To give Richardson his due, however, one need recall that his subtle, detailed, even obsessive study of character and sensibility in Clarissa not is only great in itself but also helped prepare the ground for the masterpieces of Sterne, Proust, and Joyce (Watt 280). That is no small achievement.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA

In nineteenth-century Russia, the twin stars were the novelists Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky-Tolstoy, the epic poet of the normal and the natural, vs. Dostoyevsky, the psychologist of the neurotic and the exceptional; the cosmopolitan Tolstoy vs. the slavophiliac Dostoyevsky. Though they at first responded warmly to each other's early books, trouble came when they produced their major works.

In 1868, Dostoyevsky, having read half of War and Peace, found it to be, in spite of various defects, "quite a major work" (Selected Letters 274). he notably liked the novel's celebration of "Russian" rather than French or Western principles. But he demurred in 1870 when someone called it a "work of genius" and one of Russia's greatest books. Such a judgment he found impossible; Pushkin was the real genius whose stories "offer a new word," and "no matter how far and high Tolstoy goes," he will be merely developing Pushkin's breakthrough (Complete Letters 243, 237).

Politics intervened in 1877, when Russia went to war with Turkey. Almost alone among the intelligentsia, Tolstoy, the urbane veteran of earlier wars and nascent pacifist, opposed the war. Dostoyevsky expressed regret that so great an author had "cut himself off from the community" in so important a matter (Troyat 373). This divergence finally affected Dostoyevsky's response to Anna Karenina, which was then coming out in installments.