Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time [Hardcover]

Joseph Frank (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 19, 2009

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A monumental achievement. . . This is not a literary biography in the usual sense of the term. . . . It is, rather, an exhaustive history of Dostoyevsky's mind, an encyclopedic account of the author as major novelist and thinker, essayist and editor, journalist and polemicist. . . . Wrought with tireless love and boundless ingenuity, it . . . [is] a multifaceted tribute from an erudite and penetrating cultural critic to one of the great masters of 19th-century fiction. -- Michael Scammell, New York Times Book Review



It is unquestionably the fullest, most nuanced and evenhanded--not to mention the most informative--account of its subject in any language, and it has significantly changed our understanding of both the man and his work. -- Donald Fanger, Los Angeles Times Book Review



In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote--personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other--Frank has succeeded triumphantly. -- J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books



Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time thus immediately becomes the essential one-volume commentary on the intellectual dynamics and artistry of this great novelist's impassioned, idea-driven fiction. . . . To understand Dostoevsky's often savage satire or nightmarish visions or just the conversations among the Karamazov brothers, one needs to grasp not only the text but also the ideological context. To both of these there is no better guide than Joseph Frank. -- Michael Dirda, Wall Street Journal



Magnificent. . . . A deeply absorbing account. -- James Wood, New Republic



It is wonderfully lucidly written and a marvellous portrait of the man behind the books. -- Nadine Gordimer, Independent



This extraordinary biography succeeds in making both irony and great ideas wholly alive, immediately accessible to us. It is a great work, both of scholarship and of art. -- A. S. Byatt, Sunday Times



A narrative of such compelling precision, thoroughness and insight as to give the reader a sense not just of acquaintanceship, but of complete identification with Dostoevsky, of looking through his eyes and understanding with his mind. -- Helen Muchnic, Boston Globe



The ideal one-volume biography of Dostoevsky could only come through a distillation of the much-acclaimed five-volume biography (1976-2002) by Joseph Frank. In compressing his longer work, editor Mary Petrusewicz tightens the rigor of a narrative that already departed from traditional biography by focusing chiefly on the ideas with which the Russian author wrestled so powerfully, providing the details of his personal life only as incidental background. Thus, for example, while readers do learn of formative incidents during Dostoevsky's four years in tsarist prison camp, what they see most clearly is how the prison experience deepened the author's faith in God while dampening his zeal for political reform. In a similar way, Frank limns only briefly the life experiences surrounding the writing of the major novels--Crime and Punishment, Demons, and Brothers Karamazov--devoting his scrutiny largely to how Dostoevsky develops the ideological tensions within each work. Readers consequently see, for instance, how Napoleonic illusions justify Raskolnikov's bloody crimes, how the Worship of Man dooms Kirillov to suicide, and how deep Christian faith enables Alyosha to resist Ivan's corrosive rationalism. Yet while probing Dostoevsky's themes, Frank also examines the artistry that gives them imaginative life, highlighting--for example--perspectival techniques that anticipate those of Woolf and Joyce. A masterful abridgement. -- Bryce Christensen, Booklist



Frank displays a brilliant command of Dostoyevsky's heroic endeavors, and his biography reads readily, especially for such a scholarly work. It compares nicely with Leon Edel's multivolume biography of Henry James. Highly recommended. -- Robert Kelly, Library Journal



One of the finest achievements of American literary scholarship. -- René Wellek, Washington Post Book World



Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time at last offers non-specialist readers access to the definitive biography of an important figure in the history of the novel. . . . Patient, cautious, critical but not judgmental, using clear language and a chronologically ordered narrative structure, Frank neutralises the unreliable and hysterical self-constructions of which his subject was capable. The result is like watching an artist building an intricate, large-scale painting around a single figure. . . . Frank's great insight is that, just as no one aspect of Dostoevsky's complex personality can be separated from the others, no part of his writing--whether aesthetic, moral, religious or political--can be quarantined from the others. Frank's biography honours the polyphony of Dostoevsky's novelistic imagination: even in truncated form, it is a rare triumph. -- Geordie Williamson, Australian



Frank's monumental five-volume study of Dostoevsky deserves to be read, if only as an inspiring lesson about how much more thrilling a focus on ideas can be than the standard biography's obsession with the connections between creativity and the subject's personal life. The series has been condensed with incisive care and respect, giving those with limited time (and budget) a chance to engage with a revelatory vision of the Russian writer's enduring greatness. -- Bill Marx, PRI's "The World"



This is the Dostoevsky we encounter in Joseph Frank's superb Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, a one-volume, 984-page condensation of Frank's five-volume biography of the author, written over the course of a long and distinguished career. . . . Few biographers could muster the intelligence and imagination needed to capture all this in a single tome. We should be grateful for Joseph Frank. -- Peter Savodnik, Commentary



With the publication of Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time earlier this year, a massive abridgement of five volumes written over three decades, Frank breaks once and for all with his early critic's stilted categories in portraying the human subject. His innovative method of biography, influenced heavily by literary criticism, starts with artistic expression and moves backward, seeking to carefully situate his subject within ideological context. . . . Without a doubt, the genius of Frank's form is in combining three modalities in crafting his narrative: literary criticism, social and intellectual history, and biography. -- Aaron Stuvland, Politics and Culture



Joseph Frank's magisterial five-volume biography of Dostoevsky--one of the exemplary achievements of our era--has invaluably been published in an abridged one-volume edition. -- Jeff Simon, Buffalo News



The depth of Frank's achievement is to put the writer and his work in social, political, ideological and historical context. -- Jeff Baker, Oregonian



Most of us spend much of our life trying to understand only a handful of people we know and love, in a span of time usually extending just three generations (from our parents to our children). Imagine, then, devoting your life to trying to make sense of one other person long dead, whom you had necessarily never met, with whom you may have nothing in common, and whose times and works must always seem elusive, encoded and frustratingly out of your reach. In a pursuit of that kind, Leon Edel trudged through five volumes on Henry James, Robert Caro is working away on his fourth installment of Lyndon Johnson's biography, and Edmund Morris is finalizing his third book on Teddy Roosevelt. Joseph Frank, though, trumps them all. After writing Feodor Dostoevsky's biography in five volumes, Frank and a gifted editor (Mary Petrusewicz) have now turned that massive, interminable endeavour into an abridged, accessible one-volume edition. -- Mark Thomas, Canberra Times



Joseph Frank, emeritus professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford and Princeton universities, fully grasped the pressure of the political and religious issues seething in and around the visionary author to whom he dedicated his career. It took him five highly praised volumes and 26 years (1976-2002) to give a full account of Dostoevsky's life, works and times; this new, hefty condensation was done in collaboration with editor and Russian scholar Mary Petrusewicz, on condition that the original five volumes remain in print, available to anyone 'wishing for a wider horizon.' . . . Frank's magisterial homage deserves no less recognition. -- Judith Armstrong, The Age



Frank's five-volume biography has been called 'magisterial' and monumental,' as well as 'nuanced,' 'lucid' and 'penetrating.' The same might be said of this shorter version. -- Marilyn McEntyre, Christian Century

From the Inside Flap

"Although the pace has quickened, the serene and magnificent persistence that Joseph Frank brought to his five volumes resonates fully in this distilled story. If (as Frank tells us) Dostoevsky 'felt ideas,' then Frank 'feels biography' at any scale, with a perfect sense of proportion."--Caryl Emerson, Princeton University, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

"[This book] ensures Frank's status as the definitive literary biographer of one of the best fiction writers ever."--David Foster Wallace

"The editing and deep thought that have gone into this magnificent one-volume condensation of Frank's magnum opus are to be greatly admired. This is the best biography of Dostoevsky, the best reading of some of the major novels, the best cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia. Just the best."--Robin Feuer Miller, Brandeis University, author of Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 984 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; abridged edition edition (October 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691128197
• ISBN-13: 978-0691128191
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 2.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #62 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Russian

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gentle touch, December 14, 2009

By 

Bill Strunk (United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Hardcover)

As the published reviews indicate, the scholarship in this biography is exemplary. But what I find most appealing about it is the thoughtful, gentle tone. The facts are here, the big ideas are examined in detail, but more than that, the biographer conveys a deep sense of awe for his subject's extraordinary career, and a genuine affection for Dostoevsky's complex character. Reading this book is uplifting.

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Russia's Tormented Prophet, March 8, 2010

By 

A. Stuvland (Washington DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Hardcover)

In the 1960s, when Joseph Frank submitted his first manuscript for a volume on Dostoevsky's fiction to Oxford University Press one reader summarized its negative reception bluntly: "I don't see how Mr. Frank can write so many pages about Dostoevsky without saying anything of his life." With the publication of Dostoevsky: A Writer In His Time earlier this year, a massive abridgement of five volumes written over three decades, Frank breaks once and for all with his early critic's stilted categories in portraying the human subject. His innovative method of biography, influenced heavily by literary criticism, starts with artistic expression and moves backward, seeking to carefully situate his subject within ideological context. The conventional biographical point of view, Frank clarifies early on in his preface, does not do justice to the complexities of Dostoevsky's creations (xiii). Thus, a precise account of an era's ideological doctrines reflected and refracted in literary achievement is the best way to fully grasp that era's most dominating figures.

Frank's objective in the abridged version is unwavering: to furnish readers with the context--social, cultural, literary, and philosophic--that will help forward a better understanding of the work (xiv). Whether or not Frank's biographical approach ought to be generalized as a model is debatable but such an approach, few would contest, is uniquely useful for Dostoevsky; the Russian literary giant was so shaped and consumed by the intellectual debates in the second half of the 19th century that his writing emanates almost naturally in capturing and defining the era's ideological--and Western literature's eternal--strivings.

There is nearly unanimous consent that Frank is a paragon of his form, with words such as `magisterial,' `authoritative' and `monumental' being the cliché in describing his analysis of Dostoevsky's life and times. Often is Frank's work called one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century and the best of Dostoevsky in any language. So, the question insists: how ought one evaluate this distilled version? Mary Petrusewicz's abridgement of the original five volumes and Joseph Frank's stamp of approval on her work provides a chance to re-consider both Frank's form and analysis in its newly calibrated and accessible style. On a more substantial level and mirroring Dostoevsky's accumulation of literary ability through time, Frank's most recent Dostoevsky is one brought forth with increased complexity and perception coming with age and experience; in short, Frank's own Brothers Karamazov as a preeminent biographer.

Without a doubt, the genius of Frank's form is in combining three modalities in crafting his narrative: literary criticism, social and intellectual history, and biography. Centering on Dostoevsky as his subject to pioneer this form, whose literature and epoch are not highly accessible or self-explanatory, is fortuitous if not unique to this particular venture. Perhaps for this reason, Frank's comprehensive treatment reads like a novel by Dostoevsky himself: meticulous, idea-driven, and patiently insistent on unearthing layer after layer of the human condition in all its beautiful and terrible complexity. Frank's form yields telling results. For instance, one simply cannot estimate the satirical impact and historical rootedness of Stavrogin and Verkhovensky in Demons without understanding the rise of the Russian nihilists, influenced as they were by Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, one of Dostoevsky's several ideological nemeses. Revolutionary fervor sweeping Europe was highly susceptible to misappropriation, Frank intimates, and in Demons Dostoevsky sought unabashedly to expose the false pretense and ideological buffoonery of a well-intentioned movement without a moral fixedness in religious faith (656). In fact, Dostoevsky captured the ideological fanaticism of the nihilists in Demons so well that Albert Camus would remark years later that he and not Karl Marx was the greatest prophet for the twentieth century.

Given his form, it is not surprising that Frank's narrative shifts considerably among the several forces swirling around the author's life, but, it also connects very well--from his upbringing in a lowly family obsessed with status and recognition to his literary maneuverings and early ideological compromises in the Petrashevsky circle. A benefit of Frank's style is in positioning and scrutinizing Dostoevsky's stories as a rich panorama of enfleshed ideas--ideas that move through time to gain precision without losing their consequential significance. For instance, Dostoevsky's trial, mock execution and exile in Omsk are probed to relate a time of deep introspection and significant ideological formation for the young writer. The full impact of nearly ten years of forced labor and military conscription tempered Dostoevsky's views on the goodness of humanity and his early, almost perfunctory sympathy toward the Utopian Socialist cause (399). Under dire conditions in Omsk, one could say, the literary giant was born, formulating ideas about the necessity of human freedom and the deforming effects of oppression on the human psyche that would enrich his character construction vastly.

In multiple ways Dostoevsky's exile would serve to greatly inform his literary license and his later mantle as a prophet for the Russian people. "It is the great teacher," Nietzsche conjectured, "that shows us how to bear steadfastly the reverses of fortune, by reminding us of what others have suffered." Dostoevsky assuredly suffered alongside criminals--mostly peasants--and Frank leverages the insight he methodically gained as a psychologist-prisoner to elucidate an intriguing perspective on the class structure at the center of the Russia's ideological struggles.

The revolutionary debate among the educated class centered ostensibly on the value and worth of the peasantry in the ushering in a new socio-political arrangement. All of these ideas Dostoevsky insisted, gave little or no credit to the peasant class or to the traditional moral fabric of the Russian obshchina (peasant community). Literature served an overt purpose and the revolutionary ideas as well as the literary establishment reflected only a small stratum of society. Frank quotes Dostoevsky reflecting on this theme in Tolstoy's novels: "There has not yet been a new word to replace that of the gentry-landowners," (612). Clearly, Dostoevsky regarded himself as uniquely capable of supplying such a new word and the early burden of representing and defending the peasants to the revolutionaries really masked the larger debate on the content of human nature.

Later on, the tension between the nihilists' complete rejection of established ideas and social institutions and Dostoevsky's affirmation of the inexorable values in the Russian peasantry reveals his incessant desire to seek out the source and landscape of human nature: what's inherent to the human condition and what is not? what is morally worth retaining and what is not?--a debate that is no doubt still pivotal to the political and social systems today.

Frank's interlocking method also enriches common motifs in Dostoevsky's literature. Nearly omnipresent in all novels is a scathing critique of liberalism in its several manifestations--atheism, rationalism, utilitarian morality, and egoism--unraveling beautifully under Frank's illustrative lens, deeply passionate but comprehensive enough not to render it too quickly in vogue. A specific example of this is in disinterring a fresh perspective on Notes from the Underground, a sneering polemic against rational egoism. The social conditions surrounding the resentful and self-loathing Underground Man remain consistent in Frank's analysis while the depth of Dostoevsky's satirical wit is flipped on its head.

The established interpretation posits the Underground Man as a tormented irrationalist in a world saturated with Chernyshevsky's ideology of rational egoism (315). But Frank credits Dostoevsky with a much more subtle usage of satire, claiming that the Underground Man is actually living in a self contradiction--accepting the precepts of rationalism in his head all the while fully rejecting it in his heart or emotively and intuitively (421). This dialectic of self-contradiction seems eminently plausible if only because of the breadth of Frank's scope in relating Dostoevsky's ultimate moral-spiritual project; his ardent belief that rational egoism necessarily implied a utilitarian morality (doing right by numbers) to the exclusion of any other moral frame. In the end, the depth of cunning and subtlety in Notes from the Underground is retained as a severe critique of a foolhardy idea, according to Dostoevsky, that was too simplistic to be grasped to its logical and soul-stifling conclusion.

In digesting his work, Frank highlights what many have considered Dostoevsky's unequaled technique of following ideas through to their ultimate end. This usage of what Dostoevsky himself referred to as "fantastic realism" stretches the interpretive scope of his work between being strictly a writer in his time and a socio-cultural prophet for an entire people. As Frank claims early on, Dostoevsky had a special talent for "feeling ideas" so perceptibly that his characters' personalities are more pathological than normal. The literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin claims that in Dostoevsky's work one sees not who a character is but rather how a character is conscious of him or herself--an agonizing self consciousness that pervades his work, especially Crime and Punishment.

Hoping to achieve the same penetrating insight into Dostoevsky's personality and psychology does not seem to be Frank's primary concern here... Read more ›

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dostoevsky - Joseph Frank (Princeton University Press), June 9, 2010

By 

BlogOnBooks "BlogOnBooks" (Los Angeles CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Hardcover)

When Joseph Frank's five volume encyclopedic biography of the life and times of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was published over the course of several years, it was widely lauded as the most comprehensive work ever undertaken on the life of this writer who has had enormous lasting impact over the past two centuries. Now, the Princeton University Review has published a condensed (though still a massive 959 pages) version of Frank's epic work that gives new readers a richly detailed overview of both Dostoevsky's writings and the times and circumstances that throughly influenced it.

Seen by many as the father of existentialism, Dostoevsky was passionately connected to the social, political and ideological movements of 19th Century Russia and Frank's depiction of the man is less an analysis of his works as much as an attempt to (and succeed in) seemlessly intertwine the events of both his individual life (from his unwanted schooling at the Academy of Military Engineers, to his early forays into journalism, to an eventual four year incarceration in Siberia) and the raging philosophical movements of his time (utopian socialism, determinism, Russian radicalism, Nihilism as well as various shades of Christianity) with the output of his career as both a prominent novelist and essayist.

Frank purposefully sets out to avoid the `purely personal biography' (which has been covered by numerous others) and seeks to explore and define what he terms the "eschatological imagination"; the fusion of the ever-evolving political and sociological backdrops of the times with the way these philosophies infuse his characters (from his essays and novels including `Poor Folk,' `Crime and Punishment' and the final masterpiece `The Brothers Karamazov') with a zeal that carries his stories out to their ultimate conclusions.

The depth and details portrayed by Frank are astonishing in both their breadth and their inalienable connection to the subject at hand. It is worth noting that a project of this scope could not have been accomplished without the insightful editing required to reduce the five volume set to a single (albeit massive) book and still maintain the magnitude and absorbing details of the original works largely intact. In this regard, this work is largely credited to Stanford PhD, Mary Petrusewicz, whose efforts should not go without mention.