Dostoevsky in Love
An Intimate Life
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Literary Non-fiction Book of the Year (2021) by The Times and Sunday Times
'Beautifully crafted and realised' -- Guardian
Dostoevsky's life was marked by brilliance and brutality. Sentenced to death as a young revolutionary, he survived mock execution and Siberian exile to live through a time of seismic change in Russia, eventually being accepted into the Tsar's inner circle. He had three great love affairs, each overshadowed by debilitating epilepsy and addiction to gambling. Somehow, amid all this, he found time to write short stories, journalism and novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, works now recognised as among the finest ever written.
In Dostoevsky in Love Alex Christofi weaves excerpts of the author's work with the historical context to immerse the reader in Dostoevsky's world: from the Siberian prison camp to the gambling halls of Europe; from the dank prison cells of the Tsar's fortress to the refined salons of St Petersburg.
Reading between the lines of his fiction, Christofi reconstructs the memoir Dostoevsky might have written had life – and literary stardom – not intervened. He gives us a new portrait of the artist as never before seen: a shy but devoted lover, an empathetic friend of the people, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fiction writer and book editor Christofi (Glass) provides a novelistic account of the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, with a focus on the Russian writer's romantic life. Christofi traces Dostoyevsky's miserable childhood, tempestuous adulthood, and novel-writing career, but also introduces readers to the women in Dostoyevsky's life. They included Apollinaria Prokofievna Suslov, whom Dostoyevsky had an affair with after she submitted a short story to his literary journal, Time, and Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, who met Dostoyevsky after he advertised for a copyist for The Gambler, and married him soon after. Christofi's approach pays off in his recreations of intimate scenes "Deserted by language, Fyodor kissed hand over and over, and they drank hot chocolate together" and in his revelations about Dostoyevsky's fiction, as when the novelist confesses, before writing The Brothers Karamazov, "There is a novel in my head and my heart, and it's begging to be written." Christofi succeeds in revealing Dostoyevsky's personality in ways no ordinary biographical treatment could.
