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Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849

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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).

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.

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.

I just finished the fifth and final volume of this great biography. Reading it is quite a task--it's around 3000 pages--but absolutely necessary for anyone who loves Dostoevsky. Frank is a meticulous scholar, his literary judgments are valid, and his writing is quite readable.

Frank takes a socio-cultural approach, and the reader learns a considerable amount about Russian culture from 1840 to 1880. This is important, because Dostoevsky (unlike Tolstoy) carefully drew from his contemporary culture when creating his novels. He wanted his novels to change his flawed culture.

But there's a problem inherent in this approach. Frank sees Dostoevsky as a product of his culture, and in many ways he was, but he was also a unique individual. The socio-cultural approach tends to reduce individuals to types, to mere products of their environment with little free will. This would have been repugnant to Dostoevsky, who repeatedly stresses that while environment does affect us, we have free will and the ability to make choices.

Frank apparently is sociological, liberal, and agnostic (he makes some disparaging comments about religion). On the other hand, Dostoevsky was psychological, conservative, and devout. Thus, as much as Frank tries, he seems to never quite "get" Dostoevsky, anymore than I could ever fully understand someone quite different from myself, such as a female Eskimo. (However, Frank does respect and "like" Dostoevsky and is not hostile to his subject).

One sign of the problem is Frank's Freud-o-phobia. Throughout the first volume, and occasionally thereafter, Frank repeatedly attacks a psychological approach to the novels. For example, he simply dismisses the many parallels between Dostoevsky's father and Feodor Karamazov, both widowers who were lecherous, cranky, rich, and brilliant. Both had problematic relationships with their sons, and in their old age both had sexual relations with voluptuous young women. Both may have been murdered. This begs for attention, but Frank completely dismisses it in favor of a cultural approach, as if Dostoevsky created Karamazov out of thin air in order to make a political point.

Still, this problem may be inherent in the socio-cultural approach. A critic cannot do everything, after all. A smaller problem is Frank's sense of the reader. He often includes long summaries of the novels and articles, as if the reader has never read them. This is particularly true when he discusses Diary of a Writer. But, what reader who has not already read most of Dostoevsky would read a 3000 page biography about him?

To deal with these issues, I suggest the reader first read Mochulsky's biography entitled Dostoevsky. New copies are expensive, but used copies are reasonable. Mochulsky is everything Frank is not--concise, devout, conservative, psychological. Mochulsky's biography is absolutely brilliant, and he seems to see straight into Dostoevsky's soul. Then, to learn about the culture and the background, move on to Frank. Again, Frank's readings of the novels are strong, particularly when he discusses the Karamazovs, they just don't have the "wow" factor you'll see in Mochulsky.

Hurrah for Dostoevsky!

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)is the world's greatest pyschological novelist probing the human mind without peer. Professor Joseph Frank of Princeton has written a five volume biography-literary commentary on the works of Dostoevsky. "The Seeds of Revolt" is the first volume in the series. This initial volume discusses the life and works of Dostoevsky from his birth to a doctor in Moscow to his arrest for a conspiracy against the goverenment in 1849. Dostoevsky was sentenced to Siberia for several years.
Dostoevsky was the second son of an emotionally distant physician and a loving mother. His father may have been murdered by his servants but this has never been proven. Dostoevsky was a shy, quiet boy who enjoyed reading and study. His father forced him to attend an Engineer Academy in Moscow. He hated it and left the army soon after his graduation. Unlike the wealthy Leo Tolstoy he came from the middle class.
Dostoevsky leaped to fame with his 1846 epistolatory novel "Poor Folk" which was aided by the good reviews given it by the influential critic Belinksy. Dostoevsky eventually broke with the Belinsky circle becoming involved in groups seeking to free the serfs. In repressive Tsarist Russia he was arrested for such participation.
Frank's book is a scholarly written study not just of Dostoevsky but of the literary and social trends of his time. The author gives succinct but sound interpretations of the author's early works. Some general readers who expect a straight biographical account may not appreciate this type of book. I, as a lover of Dostoevsky's works, found it fascinating. We see the literary influences on the young Dostoevsky (Balazac, Hoffman, George Sand, Schiller, Sue, Scott and others); his movement from Romanticism to a deep psychological understanding of humanity and his Slavophilic and Messianic view of Russia.

La mejor biografia de Dostoievsky escrita en ingles hasta el momento. Una joya insuperable.