Customer Reviews

Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

...and with the fourth volume come the miracles. In the space of six years, Dostoevsky wrote "Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot," and "Demons" --- all of them masterpieces.

"Crime & Punishment" took Russia by storm; it was said that nobody read anything else in the year 1866. It was also said that reading it was so hypnotizing that it was actually dangerous. Myself, I haven't read this novel since I was in my 20's, but I'm quite sure that a re-reading is coming right up. I remember well that "The Idiot" was just as maddeningly hypnotic. But I haven't yet read "Demons" AKA "The Possessed."

To think that one man wrote all of this in six years is simply mind-boggling, not to mention his novellas "The Gambler" and "The Constant Husband." Plagued by poverty and epileptic fits, the story of these six years is just fascinating, and once again shows that Joseph Frank was absolutely right when he cast everything else aside and decided to devote his life to understanding this man Dostoevsky, who may lay claim to the mantle of the greatest novelist of the 19th century.

For lovers of literature, this is the prime stuff!