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Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881

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"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.

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.

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.

It is hard to find enough good words to praise Joseph Frank's achievement in this triumphant literary biography. It is one of the most satisfying things I have ever read. At times you think that Frank is getting a little too detailed, but within a minute you understand the purpose of the detail. There is an equally telling moment in this final volume, when Dostoevsky is replying to an editor who wants D. to cut "an unnecessary detail." Dostoevsky's reply is vastly illuminating. To paraphrase: "You must remember that it is not I, the author, who is speaking: it is Ivan Karamazov, the literary character. This 'unnecessary detail' is meant to show the reader that Ivan has been thinking about this crime, and other similar crimes, for years. He didn't just read about them and forget them; he has been meditating on them for a long time, and this 'little detail' is proof of his very detailed thinking. Please remember this in the future: you are not reading what the author thinks, you are reading the thoughts of an artistically created character."

Whew! So much for Dostoevsky being a "sloppy writer."

He was also, in a strange way, the world's first blogger! He did it without computers or the Internet, but his journal "A Writer's Diary" was almost exactly what good bloggers create today: it was written by himself (100 percent) and actually sold very well. It was this "blog" which brought him to national prominence and fame, as well as his public readings, which moved audiences to tears and brought fifteen or twenty standing ovations.

As for "The Brothers Karamazov," at some level it cannot be "explained" --- literary masterpieces do not lend themselves to "explanation" very well: they create and exist in their own world, from "The Iliad" through "The Little Prince." But Joseph Frank surely provides all the available explanatory background, and it is actually thrilling to see all the little pieces of Dostoevsky's life coming together as he finally and confidently creates the masterwork which stunned his countrymen, and still stuns the world.

Books are gateways to other worlds. Nineteenth-century Russia is so different from twenty-first century America that Frank's work amounts to a magic-carpet ride, transporting us to an alien yet extremely important time and place, where vast intellectual and social forces were getting ready to completely shatter the "Old Russia" and give birth to something totally unexpected and vastly malignant. Abstract ideas such as "Utopian Socialism" and "Left Hegelian atheism" --- the intellectual brew stirred up by Chernyshevsky and many others --- were preparing the ground for the coup led by Lenin, and the Communist government that eventually produced sixty million corpses.

This biography winds up being about much more than Dostoevsky --- it has to be about much more. It will open your eyes to the world of nineteenth-century philosophy and literature in a completely new way. Names such as Schiller, George Sand, Eugene Sue, and Victor Hugo take on new aspects and are seen in a new light. I would compare this experience to a really excellent graduate course taught by a brilliant teacher.

Highest possible recommendation!

Not until in this the fifth and final volume of Frank's biographical look at Dostoevsky's books is the issue of antisemitism fully dealt with, and good heavens what PASSIM references there are! Finally, Dostoevsky's introduction of the blood libel myth into The Brothers Karamazov got on Frank's nerves (I don't know if Frank is Jewish though): "[T]hat Dostoevsky should have introduced such material at all, no matter how topical it may have been, leaves a permanent stain on his reputation that nothing can efface.....NOW, he gives the widest possible circulation to this age-old vilification, first used in classical antiquity against the early Christians themselves." (p. 670)

Yet Frank's words for the book itself include: "genius," "grandeur," "poetic power," "symbolic elevation," "a monumental power of self-expression to his characters which rivals that of Dante's sinners and saints, Shakespeare's titanic heroes and villains, and Milton's gods and archangels....with the same superhuman majesty as the figures of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel." To save ink Frank might as well compare The Brothers Karamazov to the Old Testament. (This would be appropriate as Christianity is a leitmotif in Dostoevsky's works.)

Such a brilliant book! (Dostoevsky's, that is.) Little wonder that Einstein, someone I admire very much, also liked it a lot, antisemitism notwithstanding.

Frank's biographical criticism runs to almost 3,000 pages from Volume I-V. I'd hoped at least 300 of those pages would be devoted to The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky's masterpiece) but I got half that number.

The "mantle of prophet" which Frank refers to of course has nothing to do with antisemitism: He means that Dostoevsky was, even more than Pushkin, the prophet of the Russian radical spirit.

A long time will pass before another definitive work on Dostoevsky supersedes this multi-volume masterpiece.

This item was sold at a discount becuase it was new, but damaged. The damage was slight and the condition was excellent! The description of the item on the purchase page was right on, but the actual damage was significantly less than I anticipated. I am very happy with my purchase.

The first was Abraham Lincoln, and thank God he lived to see the Civil War to its conclusion. Unfortunately, Dostoevsky died of smoking-induced emphysema before his genious was able to formulate the aims of a revolution, potentially of comparable historical import to our own. This is my analogy -- not Frank's -- but his "biography" does make my view legitimate, I think.
Dostoevsky's sway over the new generation of radical activists was profound enough that he aimed to transform the ideology of socialist revolution into the ideology of a unique Russian Christian renaissance, in opposition to the secular materialism of the civilized world. In the author's eschatalogical imagination, he envisaged a Russian revolution of sentiment that would have had the opposite effect of France's "liberty, equality, and (compulsory) fraternity" -- but he died before he was able to manifest his positive ideal in its complete force through the character of Alyosha Karamazov. Thus, it would be interesting to find out what the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov would have been and also to see how Russians would have taken such a message.
Frank's "biography" should bolster most people's initial internal response to Dostoevsky's work -- a response that most of us have to struggle to articulate.