Here are some of the reasons to read DOSTOEVSKY: A WRITER IN HIS TIME, despite its formidable length: Because it itself is an abridgement of the five separate volumes (averaging 500 pages each) of the magisterial biography Joseph Frank wrote over a 25-year period. Because Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the world's greatest authors and, intellectually (as well as spiritually?), one of the most complex of the world's great writers. Because with Dostoevsky, knowledge of his life and times is more helpful in understanding his literary work than is true for many authors. And because Frank's biography - both in its original five volumes and in this one-volume abridgement - is the definitive study of Dostoevsky's life and work, at least in English (and is likely to remain so for decades to come).
Here are some of the major points discussed at some length in Frank's biography that are most germane to an understanding of Dostoevsky the author:
* Of all the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century - including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy - Dostoevksy was the only one who did not come from a family belonging to the landed gentry. On his father's side, he was descended from Lithuanian nobility, but the family had fallen to "the lowly class of non-monastic clergy." While his family was not poor, it certainly was not wealthy, and in the course of his life Dostoevsky had much greater exposure to the Russian masses than, say, his contemporaries and rivals Turgenev and Tolstoy. One result was that throughout his life Dostoevsky evinced genuine empathy for the Russian peasantry still untouched by secular Western culture.
* The core formative experience of Dostoevsky's life began in 1849, when he was twenty-seven and arrested for belonging to a group that studied and espoused certain tenets of European Liberalism that, in the unsettled circumstances of the day, were feared by the Tsar and his advisors to be revolutionary. Dostoevsky, along with others, was brought to a square in Petersburg for public execution. At the very last moment, while the first group of three stood blindfolded before the firing squad, the execution was cancelled. Instead Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor at a prison camp in Siberia. The mock execution both steeled Dostoevsky and awakened him to the extraordinary blessing and infinite value of life itself. In exposing him to the lowest depths of society and the truly outcast and desperate, the four years in prison in Siberia gave Dostoevsky uncommon insights into human psychology.
* Dostoevsky was deeply religious (of the Russian Orthodox faith), but he also understood, as well as perhaps any author in history, the conflict between faith and reason. He resolved that conflict in inimitable fashion, albeit along the lines of Kierkegaard's "leap of faith."
* For Dostoevsky "it was a moral-psychological necessity of the human personality to experience itself as free". Consequently, he rejected all modern or "scientific" dogmas of determinism and materialism. Indeed, in all of literature he is one of the foremost spokesmen for human free will.
* He was keenly interested in the contemporary events and politics of Russia and he integrated sensational events or scandals into his fiction and he used his fiction to comment on the major social, political, and cultural issues of the day.
In addition to discussing Dostoevsky's life and the social-political and ideological context for his novels, Frank also devotes considerable attention to an explication and interpretation of each of Dostoevsky's major works. These discussions were invaluable to me as I read through all of Dostoevsky's major works over the past year. As matters developed, I did not read DOSTOEVSKY: A WRITER IN HIS TIME straight through. Rather, I read the biography up to the discussion of Dostoevsky's first major work, "The House of the Dead" (an account of his time in the Siberian prison camp), then I read the work itself, then I returned to the biography to read Frank's discussion of that work and continued on to the next major work, "Notes from the Underground", which I then read, and I continued in similar fashion through "Crime and Punishment", "The Gambler", "The Idiot", "The Devils", and "The Brothers Karamazov." It turned out to be an excellent way of making my way through Dostoevsky's oeuvre with enhanced understanding.
I should add that Frank's biography is, for such an authoritative work, surprisingly readable. Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford, but his DOSTOEVSKY, thankfully, is NOT freighted with academic jargon and syntax. It is in many respects a model of literary biography.
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About the author
Illuminating
Amazing Biography. The best thing about it is that Joseph Frank details the ideology and themes and purpose of each of Dostoyevsky’s writings, stories and novels better than any spark notes could. This is the best thing about this book. You really understand Dostoyevsky’s mind, his real reason for his works and what he was trying to convey.
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