Dostoevsky
The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Volume three of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time
Joseph Frank’s award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the Russian novelist in any language and one of the greatest literary biographies ever written. In this monumental work, Frank blends biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism to illuminate Dostoevsky’s works and set them in their personal, historical, and 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.
This volume begins with the writer’s return to Saint Petersburg after a ten-year Siberian exile and traces how his engagement in the cultural and social ferment of Russia in the early 1860s led to his discovery of the themes that would underlie his mature masterpieces.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This fourth installment in Frank's acclaimed, projected five-volume biography presents an astonishingly vivid, uncanny portrait of Dostoevsky's spiritual, emotional and artistic development during his crucial years abroad. Marrying his pert, reserved stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (his first wife died in 1864), Dostoevsky fled Russia with her in 1867 to escape harassing creditors and grasping dependents. Their obscure, lonely existence in Germany, Switzerland and Italy, until their return to Russia in 1871, was punctuated by the tragic death of their first child, Sofya, who lived only two months; by the penurious writer's frequent, disabling epileptic fits; by his mania for gambling; and by a stormy meeting with liberal, pro-Western Turgenev in Baden-Baden. The miracle implied by the book's title is that during this period, Dostoevsky wrote three major novels-Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Devils-plus two novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. Frank anchors the prophetic writer in his social and cultural milieu, tracing his struggles against Russian nihilists, his expose of the pitfalls of revolutionary politics, his messianic nationalism and his vision of an authentic Russian culture rooted in Christian morality and mystical union with the soil.
