Farrell and Dostoevsky

Abstract

In the dream Farrell feels the ideas and passions of Dostoevsky's novel moving inside his head, motion symbolized in the dream by the highly charged image of the book itself, an image of his copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Regarding the terms of this dream, we can say that Dostoevsky had not merely interfered with Farrell's dreams. The intensity of feeling and the image of the book slightly aslant but significantly fixed in his head, as well as the obscure undercurrent of mental agitation-these things suggest that Dostoevsky, through The Brothers, not only had entered and interfered with Farrell's dreams but had become an unconscious part of his critical and artistic persona, animating his own ideas and passions as a critic and an artist. A few days prior to the night of this dream Farrell had contracted for fifty dollars to write for the New York Times Book Review an essay on Dostoevsky, published early in 1944 and later reprinted in his collection of essays, The League of Frightened Philistines. By the night of his dream, Farrell had for the past two weeks been rereading The Brothers Karamazov for the third time; he had read it first in 1927, as a college student working nights in a gas station in Chicago; and then again in 1938 on an ocean liner taking him on his second trip to Europe. Beginning in 1927, then, The Brothers Karamazov had had a profound and continuing effect on Farrell's own sense of himself and his practices as a writer at the beginning of his career. In a letter to his publisher James Henle, ten days before having the dream about The Brothers, Farrell recalls that, after I finished reading it for the first time