- Paperback: 539 pages
- Publisher: Princeton University Press; New e. edition (9 Dec 1996)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0691015872
- ISBN-13: 978-0691015873
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 15.2 x 3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,061,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Review
[Dostoevsky] is the genius who has done the most to illumine nineteenth-century Russian psychology and to make the terrifying problems of atheism and nihilism part of the modernism we still grapple with. Frank's magisterial five-volume study of his life and work ... salutes the grandeur of Dostoevsky's project. -- Lesley Chamberlain, The [London] Times
In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote-personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other-Frank has succeeded triumphantly. -- J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
[Frank's] high contribution is to chronicle the life and elaborate the social-political-cultural matrix in which to consider the writings, and to do this more thoroughly and comprehensively than has been previously done. -- Stephen Jan Parker, The New York Times Book Review
For a reader ready to grapple with the most powerful ideas and feelings in Dostoevsky's extraordinary life and work, this book is a godsend. -- Irwin Weil, The "Washington Post Book World
In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote-personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other-Frank has succeeded triumphantly. -- J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
[Frank's] high contribution is to chronicle the life and elaborate the social-political-cultural matrix in which to consider the writings, and to do this more thoroughly and comprehensively than has been previously done. -- Stephen Jan Parker, The New York Times Book Review
For a reader ready to grapple with the most powerful ideas and feelings in Dostoevsky's extraordinary life and work, this book is a godsend. -- Irwin Weil, The "Washington Post Book World
Product Description
This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. All the while, he worried that his recurrent epileptic attacks were impairing his literary capacities. His enforced exile intensified not only his love for his native land but also his abhorrence of the doctrines of Russian Nihilism--which he saw as an alien European importation infecting the Russian psyche. Two novels of this period were thus an attempt to conjure this looming spectre of moral-social disintegration, while The Idiot offered an image of Dostoevsky's conception of the Russian Christian ideal that he hoped would take its place.
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First Sentence
During an earlier period of Dostoevsky's life, in the years of his arrest for political conspiracy, imprisonment, and exile to Siberia-the period covered in the second volume of the present series, The Years of Ordeal-he had been buffeted about by a succession of unexpected and quite sensational events. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
During an earlier period of Dostoevsky's life, in the years of his arrest for political conspiracy, imprisonment, and exile to Siberia-the period covered in the second volume of the present series, The Years of Ordeal-he had been buffeted about by a succession of unexpected and quite sensational events. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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4 reviews
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
An Outstanding Biography
9 May 2000
Format:Hardcover
Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoievsky is a picture of the artist in the context of his century. It is not only a brilliant portrait of a great man but an image of nineteenth century Russia. It is neither patronizing nor overly analytic, but provides a taste of Dostoievky's life - making his thoughts, actions, and writings fuse into a coherent whole. I have probably read hundreds of biographies in my life and this one is the best.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Notes from the Underground
14 July 2008
Format:Paperback
Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half."
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Literary biography is a tough genre. The challenge for the biographer is to avoid doing a hatchet job on the one hand, and being a shill on the other (Max Brod's panegyric to Kafka comes to mind). Among the best at the genre are Richard Ellman (James Joyce, Oscar Wilde); Ron Powers (Mark Twain); Leon Edel (Henry James) and Joseph Frank, whose massive, five-volume biography of Dostoevsky is a marvel.
Frank succinctly sums up his task: "The aim of literary biography, as I conceive it, is to furnish readers with a context, drawn from the writer's personal life,as well as from the social, cultural, literary and philosphical background of his or her time, that will help toward a better understanding of the work."
The son of an abusive alcoholic father and a consumptive mother; a compulsive gambler, introspective and melancholic; given to epileptic seizures; sentenced to a Gulag and forced to serve in a Russian regiment; chronically broke and peripatetic; variously lionized and demonized by his critics and supporters -- there's enough material in Dostoevsky's life for a five volume biography, which, written over a 30 year period, Frank provides.
Of course he has a lot to work with: Dostoevsky left reams of material, including diaries, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. His collected works, in Russian, run to 30 volumes. Frank makes ample use of this material, especially in his analysis of Dostoevsky's major works in this period, "Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot," and "The Devils." Like a bipolar person, Dostoevsky swung from deep depression to exalted heights. He could plumb the depths of human depravity one minute, and celebrate the heights of the human spirit the next.
An example is one of his frequent gambling binges. "(The letter) also contains a frank admission of his recent gambling escapades, which Dostoevsky explains, in his usual fashion, in terms of the lure of freeing himself from debt in one miraculous stroke. "In one fell swoop to get out of all these proceedings with his creditors, provide for myself for a time and for my family. "But Dostoevsky is honest enough to add that gambling contains its own vertiginous attraction ("You know how that draws you in") (Frank, P. 224)
Frank's scholarship is exemplary, his writing lucid, and his subject mesmerizing.
"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half."
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Literary biography is a tough genre. The challenge for the biographer is to avoid doing a hatchet job on the one hand, and being a shill on the other (Max Brod's panegyric to Kafka comes to mind). Among the best at the genre are Richard Ellman (James Joyce, Oscar Wilde); Ron Powers (Mark Twain); Leon Edel (Henry James) and Joseph Frank, whose massive, five-volume biography of Dostoevsky is a marvel.
Frank succinctly sums up his task: "The aim of literary biography, as I conceive it, is to furnish readers with a context, drawn from the writer's personal life,as well as from the social, cultural, literary and philosphical background of his or her time, that will help toward a better understanding of the work."
The son of an abusive alcoholic father and a consumptive mother; a compulsive gambler, introspective and melancholic; given to epileptic seizures; sentenced to a Gulag and forced to serve in a Russian regiment; chronically broke and peripatetic; variously lionized and demonized by his critics and supporters -- there's enough material in Dostoevsky's life for a five volume biography, which, written over a 30 year period, Frank provides.
Of course he has a lot to work with: Dostoevsky left reams of material, including diaries, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. His collected works, in Russian, run to 30 volumes. Frank makes ample use of this material, especially in his analysis of Dostoevsky's major works in this period, "Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot," and "The Devils." Like a bipolar person, Dostoevsky swung from deep depression to exalted heights. He could plumb the depths of human depravity one minute, and celebrate the heights of the human spirit the next.
An example is one of his frequent gambling binges. "(The letter) also contains a frank admission of his recent gambling escapades, which Dostoevsky explains, in his usual fashion, in terms of the lure of freeing himself from debt in one miraculous stroke. "In one fell swoop to get out of all these proceedings with his creditors, provide for myself for a time and for my family. "But Dostoevsky is honest enough to add that gambling contains its own vertiginous attraction ("You know how that draws you in") (Frank, P. 224)
Frank's scholarship is exemplary, his writing lucid, and his subject mesmerizing.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Great Insight Into A Great Genius
20 Jun 2007
Format:Paperback
Joseph Frank, generally considered the world's foremost expert on Dostoyevsky, provides all the background you would ever need to truly understand the great mind that was Dostoyevsky. An indispensable guide to the master's great works.
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