Pynchon & Dostoevsky & P's Crystal Palace in GR.

[Heikki R]

Another influence might be Dickens. For an essay on GR's London I wrote 23
years ago, one of the sources was Martin Tropp's  "Images Of Fear: How
Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture (1818-1918)" (1990), esp. the
chapter "Beneath the Crystal Palace". Tropp argues that the Crystal Palace
and Great Exhibition prompted Dickens to write something of
their counter-construction: "Bleak House". I did some googling today and
noticed that more articles on the Great Exhibition-Bleak House relationship
have been published in the last twenty years.

Here's a link to the passage in question in my essay "Something's Stalking
Through the City of Smoke": Tracing the Ins and Outs of Gravity's Rainbow'"
https://sites.google.com/view/thecityofsmoke/home

In the unlikely case that someone wanted to read the whole essay that was
published in Pynchon Notes 42-43 (1998):
https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/article/id/2485/


Best,
Heikki





ma 27. jouluk. 2021 klo 12.29 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> kirjoitti:

> Seems Dostoevsky visited the Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1863.
>
> Nikolai Cherneshevski, a Russian literary and social critic of the time,
> --who wrote the polemical and very popular "novel"
> *What is to Be Done? *used that Crystal Palace exhibition as a symbol of
> supposed progress, etc. against how bad Russia
> and so much of the world was....
>
> And Dostoevsky, whose C & P was, although it transcended any polemical
> fight, also an engagement with Cherneshevski's
> critique, gave the name "Crystal Palace" to an eating and drinking
> establishment in St. Petersburg which did not exist there.
> (FD was accurate in most place things in C & P). There was a hotel with
> that name, surely preceding the Exhibit?
>
> It is here where Raskolnikov asks for recent issues of the major paper in
> order to read about the deaths of the pawnbroker woman
> and her sister, which he committed before his lost delirium days.
>
> Sounds to me like FD putting the irreducibility of unexplained evil at the
> heart of Crystal Palace optimism about historical progress
> and human species growth.
>
> TRP probably learned about The Crystal Palace here, right?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>