The making of a counter-culture icon : Henry Miller's Dostoevsky / Maria Bloshteyn.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon gives invaluable insight into the early careers of the Villa Seurat writers and testifies to Dostoevsky's influence on twentieth-century literature.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Bloshteyn (Univ. of Toronto Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies) won an award for the doctoral dissertation on which this book is based--an award validated by the book's surprising combination of readability and multilingual erudition. This is the first book-length treatment of the Villa Seurat circle (chiefly Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and Lawrence Durrell), but not the first book-length treatment of Dostoevsky's influence on 20th-century American literature. The book's narrow scope precludes the author from demonstrating her assertion that Dostoevsky's "work shaped the development of an entire national literature." Admirably demonstrated, however, is the stylistic and philosophical influence of Dostoevsky on the "revolutionary" and "transliterary" prose of Miller, Nin, and Durrell, especially on texts begun during the Villa Seurat years (the 1930s). Those looking for a more extensive treatments of these subjects will find them in James Decker's Henry Miller and Narrative Form (2005) and Helen Muchnic's Dostoevsky's English Reputation (1939), the latter long outdated but still groundbreaking. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and researchers. R. E. Gibbons Our Lady of the Lake University