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[email protected] nchlondon.ac.uk Working Paper Series Lawrence, Dostoevsky, and the Last Temptation by Christ Catherine Brown NCH WP2018-08 June 2018 1 Accepted (pre-proof) manuscript of an article that will be published by DH Lawrence Society in Journal of DH Lawrence Studies (2018). LAWRENCE, DOSTOEVSKY, AND THE LAST TEMPTATION BY CHRIST Catherine Brown Lawrence’s fraught and rivalrous relationship with Fyodor Dostoevsky was throughout his life connected with his fraught and rivalrous relationship to Christ. Both authors were, to use Murry’s term about Lawrence, “Christ-haunted”, and both were likened to Christ Himself. Lawrence criticised Dostoevsky for endorsing what he perceived to be one of Christ’s false doctrines - albeit only with the mental, willed, and unartistic part of his divided self. In response to Koteliansky and Murry’s translation of Dostoevsky’s Pages from the Journal of an Author, he wrote to Koteliansky in December 1916: How is it that these foul-living people ooze with such loving words. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” – well and good, if you’ll hate thy neighbour as thyself. I can’t do with this creed based on self-love, even when the self-love is extended to cover the whole of humanity. – No, when he was preaching, Dostoevsky was a rotten little stinker. In his art he is bound to confess himself lusting in hate and torture. But his “credo” - ! my God, what filth! (3L 53) 2 Lawrence made his final paired meditation on Dostoevsky and Christ just five weeks before his death, in an eight-page Introduction to Koteliansky’s translation of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ episode of Dostoevsky’s 1879-80 novel The Brothers Karamazov (itself completed only four months before Dostoevsky’s death).