Polyphonic Powys: Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, and A Glastonbury Romance

Abstract

Criticism has needed neither to question nor to insist on the importance of Dostoevsky for John Cowper Powys: the influence was claimed and proclaimed by Powys himself throughout his career. From Powys's first reading of Dostoevsky—Vizetelly's translation of Crime and Punishment in December 1910, through uncountable lectures, an essay in his first book of literary criticism, Visions and Revisions (1915), the dramatization of The Idiot (written c 1919; produced 1922; unpublished), and an essay in The Pleasures of Literature (1938), to the two-hundred-page book on Dostoevsky (1946), there is a firm continuity of attention and allegiance.