Reading Experience Database
1450-1945

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Record 19802

Reading Experience:

Evidence:
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 August 1911: 'Les Freres Karamazov is one of the greatest of novels [...] Have you read it? & the extraordinary speech of Ivan about Christ & Christianity & socialism which goes on without stopping for about 50 pages? I am halfway through. The Agamemnon is childish compared to it. I read it in trains & on steamers in inextricable fjords & on great lakes, very slowly, as befits it, in perpetual sunshine; I shall never finish it I think or perhaps it will never end. And Edgar [Woolf] is always sitting by me reading the Ordeal of Richard Feverel [...] We went up the coast from Gotenberg towards Norway [...] Then we wandered up a fjord to a detestable town called Uddevala [...] Then we took a toy steamboat & sailed over the lake [...] to Leksamd & thence here [Raatvik]. It was pleasant to sit on deck reading Les Freres at the rate of a page an hour, gliding past the shores from which the fair haired naked men & women perpetually waved their hands to us.'
Century: 1900-1945
Date: Between 1 Jul 1911 and 2 Aug 1911
Country: Sweden
Time: n/a
Place: other location: On board railway trains
   
Type of Experience (Reader):
silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
Type of Experience (Listener):
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Reader/Listener/Reading Group:

Reader:Leonard Woolf
Age Adult (18-100+)
Gender Male
Date of Birth 25 Nov 1880
Socio-economic group: Professional / academic / merchant / farmer
Occupation: Colonial civil servant (on leave)
Religion: n/a
Country of origin: England
Country of experience: Sweden
Listeners present if any:
(e.g. family, servants, friends, workmates)
n/a
Additional comments: n/a

 

Text Being Read:

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Title: Les Freres Karamazov
Genre: Fiction
Form of Text: Print: Book
Publication details: In French translation
Provenance: unknown

 

Source Information:

Record ID: 19802  
Source - Print  
  Author: n/a
  Editor: Frederic Spotts
  Title: Letters of Leonard Woolf
  Place of Publication: London
  Date of Publication: 1990
  Vol: n/a
  Page: 166
  Additional comments: n/a

Citation: Frederic Spotts (ed.), Letters of Leonard Woolf (London, 1990), p. 166, http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=19802, accessed: 17 April 2024

Additional comments:

 

 

Reading Experience Database version 2.0.  Page updated: 27th Apr 2016  3:15pm (GMT)