Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 [Hardcover]

Joseph Frank (Author)

Book Description

Series: Dostoevsky (Frank, Joseph) | Publication Date: April 8, 2002

This fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's justly celebrated literary and cultural biography of Dostoevsky renders with a rare intelligence and grace the last decade of the writer's life, the years in which he wrote A Raw Youth, Diary of a Writer, and his crowning triumph: The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoevsky's final years at last won him the universal approval toward which he had always aspired. While describing his idiosyncratic relationship to the Russian state, Frank also details Doestoevsky's continuing rivalries with Turgenev and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky's appearance at the Pushkin Festival in June 1880, which preceded his death by one year, marked the apotheosis of his career--and of his life as a spokesman for the Russian spirit. There he delivered his famous speech on Pushkin before an audience stirred to a feverish emotional pitch: "Ours is universality attained not by the sword, but by the force of brotherhood and of our brotherly striving toward the reunification of mankind." This is the Dostoevsky who has entered the patrimony of world literature, though he was not always capable of living up to such exalted ideals.

The writer's death in St. Petersburg in January of 1881 concludes this unparalleled literary biography--one truly worthy of Dostoevsky's genius and of the remarkable time and place in which he lived.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

These two works add immensely to our understanding of Dostoevsky, though they have quite different purposes: Frank completes his monumental biography of Dostoevsky, while Scanlan examines the Russian writer's philosophical thought. Scanlan (emeritus, philosophy, Ohio State Univ.) argues that while much has been said about Dostoevsky as a writer, he has rarely been treated as a philosopher. Yet through his writings, he explored a variety of philosophical issues, primarily concerning the nature of humankind. Scanlan studies Dostoevsky's nationalism, opposition to rational egotism, and beliefs about our eternal souls, moral agency, and aesthetic needs. Of course, Dostoevsky's philosophy was framed within a Christian worldview, and Scanlan does excellent work discussing Dostoevsky's ideas in terms of his religious faith. Readers wanting to learn more about the thought of one of Russia's great writers will find this work essential.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Like the life it chronicles, Frank's magisterial biography of Dostoevsky concludes in the radiance of rare achievement. In this fifth and final volume, Frank surpasses even the brilliance of the earlier volumes in probing the literary genius that rose to an unexpected zenith in his Brothers Karamazov. Both in illuminating the historical context for this masterpiece and in celebrating its imaginative artistry, Frank amplifies Dostoevsky's singular contribution to world literature. No one understands better than Frank the torturous process through which Dostoevsky converted his personal observations into deathless characters--the impulsive sensualist, Dimitri; the cynical rationalist, Ivan; the self-sacrificing idealist, Alyosha. Frank likewise surpasses other commentators in capturing the defining moment in Russian culture when Dostoevsky triumphed over Turgenev with his famous Pushkin speech. But Frank also confronts the failures of Dostoevsky's final years: the legal missteps in editing The Citizen; the wooden plotting of A Raw Youth; the chauvinistic polemics of the Diary of a Writer. And in narrating the author's personal life, Frank opens to the reader Dostoevsky's moments of deepest vulnerability: his rage against his wife, Anna, when a prank went awry; his grief when his three-year-old son unexpectedly died; his anguish when his rival, Tolstoy, apostatized from Christianity. The complexities in Frank's nuanced portrait well reflect a central motif of Dostoevsky's own fiction: the irreducible mystery of the human soul. A landmark biography, certain to win praise from scholars and Dostoevsky readers everywhere. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 812 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (April 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691086656
• ISBN-13: 978-0691086651
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #542,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Warning--this is but the last volume in a great biography, May 9, 2002

By 

Ursiform (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Hardcover)

"Dostoevsky : The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881" is the fifth and final volume in Frank's extraordinary biography of Dostoevsky, a remarkable undertaking of more than a quarter century. While every volume has been exceptional and well worth reading, because they share a title and differ only in subtitle Amazon's system tends to muddle reviews of the various volumes together. This final volume covers the last decade of Dostoevsky's life, so don't buy it expecting a one-volume bio of the great writer. If you care about Dostoevsky's work find copies of the first four volumes, read them, then read this book. The series sets a superlative standard for examining a great writer's life and works, but this volume isn't really intended to stand alone, despite a short "story-to-date" intro.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Final Volume in the Biography of a Literary Giant, September 1, 2002

By 

Roy E. Perry "amateur philosopher" (Nolensville, Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Hardcover)

Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 is the long-awaited final volume by Joseph Frank, Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature Emeritus at Stanford University.

Previous volumes in the series are: Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849; Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859; Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865; and Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871.

It was during the final decade of his life, 1871-1881, that Dostoevsky wrote Diary of a Writer and his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Many pages of Frank's fifth volume deals with analzying these two works (140 pages for The Brothers Karamazov alone).

With impressive literary scholarship, Frank throws light on the historical, political, economic, social, cultural, and literary setting within which Dostoevsky created his works of art, novels of great psychological depth.

For example, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, by the way, from whom I had anything to learn; he is one of the happiest accidents of my life, even more so than my discovery of Stendhal."

Dostoevsky traced the roots of the evils in Russian society to a loss of religious faith. By "religious faith" he meant specifically the Christian faith of the Russian Orthodox Church. He thought the Roman Catholic Church was a distortion and perversion of true Christianity. (See the harangue Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of Prince Myshkin in Part Four, Chapter VII, of The Idiot.

Of particular interest is Frank's discussion of Dostoevsky's philosophical thinking (framed, of course, within a Christian worldview), such as his ruminations on Russian nationalism, rational egoism, and the freedom of the will, and his grave concerns over the adverse moral and political effects of atheism and nihilism.

Frank soft-pedals Dostoevsky's notorious anti-Semitism, seeking to exonerate his hero as being simply "a child of his time."

Although one finds many things to dislike about Dostoevsky, one cannot help being impressed by his literary genius. Recognizing the excellence of Dostoevsky's art, Frank devotes the lion's share of his volume not to the man himself but to the man's literary production.

While this is surely not the fault of Joseph Frank, one is depressed by the seemingly endless fare of Russian sectarian bickering and murky political maneuverings. One breathes a huge sigh of relief to escape this oppressive atmosphere.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a crowning achievement, June 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Hardcover)

A truly triumphant conclusion to a massive and passionate undertaking. Frank shows the highest standards of scholarship in being objective, fair, yet sympathetic to one of the greatest of all writers. In this final volume, we have Dostoevsky living and breathing the Russian air of his beloved land seething with social, cultural and political issues of the day. An engaged and far-seeing artist if ever there was one. The complexity and paradoxical simplicity of his life presents us a real genius often at odds with the way he would be perceived by many of his readers, yet a humane and sincere human being. Now go back and read the magnificent works he has given us from his pen.