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So I was reading Claire Tomalin's biography of Dickens and she recounts a story Dostoevsky told a friend in a letter of how he had visited Dickens in London in the 1860s.
Dostoevsky was a great admirer of Charles D and had voraciously devoured his works while in prison. When they met they talked a while and Dickens allegedly admitted to Fyodor that his "good" characters (Oliver, Charles Darnay, Bob Cratchit, Sam Weller, Nell, Tom Pinch, etc) were what he wished he was whilst his villains (Quilp, Pecksniff, Murdstone, Scrooge, Bill Sykes, Wackford Squeers, etc) were what he really was deep inside.
1. Was this story bullshit? Was Dostoevsky known to lie?
2. I've heard actors say it is more fun to play the villain - does any writer legitimately identify with "good" characters, or do they simply put them there for balance, convention, or to mask their real internal natures?
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>>9696365
I read a piece on this meeting on TLS (Times Literary Supplement) recently. Can post it via pastebin or something if anyone wants
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>>9696365
Dickens spoke English and Dostoevsky spoke Russian.
Like, whoa nigga, how could they have talked to each other if they didn't speak the same language? I call some BS on this one
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>>9696375
French?
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>>9696370
A section from said piece:
> I have been teaching courses on Dostoevsky for over two decades, but I had never come across any mention of this encounter. Although Dostoevsky is known to have visited London for a week in 1862, neither his published letters nor any of the numerous biographies contain any hint of such a meeting. Dostoevsky would have been a virtual unknown to Dickens. It isn’t clear why Dickens would have opened up to his Russian colleague in this manner, and even if he had wanted to, in what language would the two men have conversed? (It could only have been French, which should lead one to wonder about the eloquence of a remembered remark filtered through two foreign tongues.) Moreover, Dostoevsky was a prickly, often rude interlocutor. He and Turgenev hated each other. He never even met Tolstoy. Would he have sought Dickens out? Would he then have been silent about the encounter for so many years, when it would have provided such wonderful fodder for his polemical journalism?
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>>9696365
why would dostoevsky make it up?
he's not nabokov
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sounds like a Dosto fan got jelly that there's a Dickens/Andersen story about Andersen's autism.
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>>9696403
Neither of them are gay, so why would they know French?
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>>9696365
I imagine that authors generally put pieces of themselves into every character they write, either intentionally or unintentionally. Seldom, I think, do authors construct characters that are wholly opposite to themselves or identical to themselves.
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>>9696430
That story is verified - and funny. Andersen was such a crybaby and outstayed his welcome at the Dickens homestead, making everyone hate him. And he didn't get it. Dickens had very little patience for weaklings like Hans C.
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>>9696434
Fucking burgers.
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>>9696370
Please, praise God. If only I could afford to pass through the paywall.
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>>9696555
It's not that Andersen was a crybaby, it was that he did nothing. He was boring beyond belief and refused to take hints to leave. If he'd been a crybaby it might at least have been interesting. Instead they got a clingy statue.
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>>9696573
https://pastebin.com/raw/jAxpXE19
Sorry for taking so long, thought this thread had died (which it did, for a while)
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