17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Monumental, October 12, 2003
This review is from: Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 (Paperback)
As Frank emphasizes repeatedly in the Preface (and in the prefaces of subsequent volumes), he is not writing as a biographer, strictly speaking, but rather as a literary critic (and to a lesser extent a socio-cultural historian) - primarily of Dostoevsky's novels. (Frank does admit that things got a little rough for him during the period of Dostoevsky's imprisonment, as he has chosen to cover the man chronologically rather than book by book.) This kind of books I have never read before, I must confess. However, I think his expressed purpose serves my needs perfectly: I am more interested in what the novels mean, than what Dostoevsky was having for dinner on a particular day. Frank's is a serious and scholarly approach, and I am sure all five volumes - now in an honored place on my shelves - will stand the test of time as the definitive work on the great Russian novels (as opposed to the great Russian novelist).
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Masterpiece, March 20, 2006
This review is from: Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 (Paperback)
The limits of a non-vernacular literary biography are mostly intuitive but Frank makes you feel like Dostoevsky wrote in English. Not that he was English, or American, he was most assuredly very Russian, but Frank's effusive manner and luminous analysis bring out a character in Dostoevsky's early work that could be easily overlooked when, as I did I first, the reader jumps from Brothers Karamazov to Crime and Punishment to the Idiot and then jumps over to Tolstoy or Turgenev. Frank shows you the pleasure of staying with Dostoevsky, immersing yourself in Dostoevsky, and that is a strong achievement indeed.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A truly magisterial accomplishment, January 21, 2011
This review is from: Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 (Paperback)
This book is the first volume in a five-volume, semi-biographical study of Dostoevsky.
The five volumes, put together, amount to some 3,000 pages!!
Who in their right mind would want to read these five volumes about a Russian novelist...much less (ahem) write them?
I'm not quite sure, but, as Joseph Frank admits, he just got sucked in. He couldn't deal with Dostoevsky on a superficial level, BUT as he probed deeper and deeper into this author and his cultural milieu, he simply got hooked. The result, for Joseph Frank, was a masterpiece of literary and cultural analysis.
The result, for us common readers, is a study that does an awful lot to explain where Dostoevsky was coming from. And he was born and raised in an extremely complex environment, where his father was trying constantly to "rise" socially --- and to instill Russian Orthodoxy into his children. From an early age, Dostoevsky was an addict of literature who inhaled other writers in a matter of months --- writers from Pushkin to Balzac. And, in his early years, he was horrified by the social conditions in Russia, where there seem to have been just three classes of people (the monarch and the aristocrats, the landed gentry, and the serf peasants --- who were actually slaves, although nobody seems to call them that.) Tolstoy, for example, was an aristocrat, who insisted on a strict distinction between his own family and their slaves, forbidding any contact between them.
What made the whole system much worse was the Russian habit of "social superiors" beating and whipping their "social inferiors," sometimes without any reason. The late adolescent Dostoevsky witnessed this for the first time, while travelling from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and the horror stuck with him for the rest of his life.
I have to echo one of the critics, who claimed that Joseph Frank has written a literary life that is as compelling and fascinating as a novel. Like Frank, I find myself getting increasingly absorbed by the tale he has to tell, and the protagonist of that tale.
Joseph Frank deserves extra-special recommendation for ignoring ALL of the degenerate literary fashions of his time: Foucault, Derrida, and "deconstruction" never even get a dishonorable mention. Instead, he devoted his life to the thing a literary critic SHOULD do: understand the cultural environment of the author, understand what the author was trying to do, and then attempt to assess his success or failure. No "theories" of literary criticism are needed, thank you very much.
In any case, I'm now into volume II of this absorbing study.
Dostoevsky, at his best, wrote masterpieces describing this socially tortured country. And he was also, from time to time, amazingly prophetic: he seems to have been about the only person who foresaw the catastrophe coming for his beloved Russia. The story of how he became a literary giant really needed to be told.
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