Joseph Frank initially published a monumental five-volume 2500 page biography of Dostovesky’s life and work between 1976-2002. In this abridged edition, editor Mary Petrusewicz seamlessly blends Frank’s profound work into a highly readable but scholarly account.
I first became familiar with Dostoyevsky’s writings when at 18. I chose a course at Dawson College in Montreal offered by Peter Ryerson called ‘A Season With Dostoyevsky’s Heroes’. In a smorgasbord of Dostoyevsky delights we studied The Gambler, The Underground Man, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ section from his greatest masterpiece Brothers Karamazov.
A few years later at Concordia University I created a Major Project in which I examined pre-revolutionary Russian writers, such as Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? (1863), Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862), Dostovevsky's The Devils (1871-1872) & a few others. Frank's book helped me to revive a few keen intellectual memories from that now ancient time.
It actually took me about three or four years to read the book thoroughly because I put it aside from time to time as the biography progressed to do other things & to further read and study Dostoyevsky’s work. The book is certainly a brilliant read for any close followers of the hugely gifted & compassionate man.
Some Book Blurbs
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
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
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
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
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
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 . . . 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
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