A delicious hoax was recently perpetrated on the highbrow literary community. It really was the tasty cake. Sometime in 2002, Arnold Harvey invented an 1862 meeting between Charles Dickens & Fyodor Dostoyevsky and had ‘evidence’ of the meeting published in a respectable literary journal. In 2011 his fabrication was briefly taken as fact and appeared in at least two Dickens biographies and numerous book reviews.
Part of Mr. Harvey’s genius was his sly reverse psychology. The meeting is mentioned in a nonchalant, matter-of-fact way towards the end of a utterly commonplace piece of scholarly boffinhood titled Dickens’s Villains: A Confession and a Suggestion. The author of the article, a pseudonymous “Stephanie Harvey,” quotes a letter from Dostoyevsky which she supposedly translated from Russian. In the letter, Dostoyevsky recalls his meeting with Dickens sixteen years after the fact. Mr/Ms. Harvey’s article appeared in vol. 98 of the literary journal the Dickensian, where it went unremarked-upon for almost ten years before biographer Claire Tomalin discovered it. She found the anecdote so “irresistable” that she put it in her tome Charles Dickens: a Life. From there the “remarkable” encounter wound up in the opening paragraph of the NYT’s review, various other reviews and biographies (including Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing), and will probably continue to be recounted as fact forever in the endless echo chamber of the Interwebs. (For the interested reader, the Times Literary Supplement contains a lengthy investigation and a speculation that Mr. Harvey is some sort of rogue scholar-vigilante).
The tantalising prospect of such a meeting seems to have intoxicated many otherwise sober critics. Nobody asked the practical questions like, what language did they communicate in? Or, had Dickens ever even heard of Dostoyevsky? The London Review of Books wrote that Ms. Tomalin “might have been less susceptible had she not so badly wanted it to be true.” And we want it to be true, too! Sadly, absent a time machine, there’s no way to make it so. But we can do the next best thing: we can train machines with the words of these two authors and then set those machines to chatting with one-another.
- FYODOR: “This hatred for Russia has been already embodied in the narrative as it stands so far and the other my own .”
- CHARLES: “We know what Russia means sir says Podsnap we know what England is.”
- FYODOR: “You thirsted while in Switzerland for your home country for Russia you read doubtless many books about Russia .”
- CHARLES: “Although I saw him every day it was for some time longer to settle myself for the present in Switzerland .”
- FYODOR: “It was a recollection of Switzerland .”
- CHARLES: “I tingle again from head to foot as my recollection turns that corner and my pen shakes in my hand .”
- FYODOR: “But I had supposed that laying aside my pen and saying farewell to my readers I should be heard …”
- CHARLES: “Upon my life the whole social system as the men call it when they make speeches in Parliament is a system of Prince ‘s nails !”
- FYODOR: “Why in the English Parliament a Member got up last week and speaking about the Nihilists asked the Ministry whether it was not high time to intervene to educate this barbarous people .”
- CHARLES: “Do n’t you know that people die there ?”
- FYODOR: “But excuse me I ‘ll make merry till I die !”
Isn’t this conversation just what we’d expected?! It’s lively, and moves quickly from Mother Russia to writing to English politics to colonialism… And what strikes me is how the character of the two authors is present in their words. Dostoyevsky’s brooding existentialism, Dickens’ concern with social justice. Their words could have come straight from their books… Because they did: this conversation was automatically generated from the two author’s oeuvres.
Sub-Subroutine 