SOURCE: Rogers, Philip. “Scrooge on the Neva: Dickens and Tolstoj's Death of Ivan Il'ič.” Comparative Literature 40, no. 3 (summer 1988): 193-218.

In the following essay, Rogers considers the influence of the work of Charles Dickens on Tolstoy's fiction, particularly upon The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Writing to Dickens in 1849, Irinarx Vvedenskij, his first Russian translator, informed him that he was “read with great zeal from the banks of the Neva to the remotest limits of Siberia” (Katarskij 1). Among his zealous Russian readers of that time was the 23-year-old Tolstoj, who first encountered Dickens—a Russian translation of David Copperfield—in 1851, while serving in the Caucasus campaign.¹ “How delightful David Copperfield is!” he noted in his diary (PSS 46:140), and soon thereafter requested that his brother send him a copy of the novel in English along with his English dictionary (PSS 59:251). Dickens was, he later concluded, “incomparably better in English” (Elpat'evskij 177). More...