Burgess, A. Flame into being: The life and work of D. H. Lawrence

Abstract

Burgess, A. (2017). Flame into being: The life and work of D. H. Lawrence. Translated and annotated by A. Nikolaevskaya. Moscow: Tsentr knigi Rudomino. 464 p.

A review of Anthony Burgess's book Flame Into Being. The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence, prepared by Book Centre Rudomino (2017). Alla Nikolaevskaya (with participation of Nikolay Paltsev) prepared a seven-volume collected works by D. H. Lawrence, and two collections of his travel journals and essays. As a translator, she succeeded here in ‘preserving and transmitting the flame of the narration about the life and work of the Nottingham Phoenix'. English literature has very few writers so unlike as Lawrence and Burgess, and yet the younger fellow English writer produced a book to mark Lawrence's centenary ‘out of love': his way of ‘paying his debts', he said. Burgess called it ‘a short literary biography', stressing that he ‘wasn't attempting a detailed biography or a literary critique of Lawrence's oeuvre'. In an attempt to describe the influence of Lawrence's character on the works he produced, Burgess engages in interpretation of the former's life and work, imprinting his own unique self-portrait into this insightful study, which is bound to interest admirers of these two towering figures of British culture.