Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
by Joseph Frank
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joseph FrankEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1996-12-09
ISBN: 0691015872
Number of pages: 539
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780691015873
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
Book Review: Notes from the Underground
Summary: 5 Stars
Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half."
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Literary biography is a tough genre. The challenge for the biographer is to avoid doing a hatchet job on the one hand, and being a shill on the other (Max Brod's panegyric to Kafka comes to mind). Among the best at the genre are Richard Ellman (James Joyce, Oscar Wilde); Ron Powers (Mark Twain) and Joseph Frank, whose massive, five-volume biography of Dostoevsky is a marvel.
Frank succinctly sums up his task: "The aim of literary biography, as I conceive it, is to furnish readers with a context, drawn from the writer's personal life,as well as from the social, cultural, literary and philosphical background of his or her time, that will help toward a better understanding of the work."
The son of an abusive alcoholic father and a consumptive mother; a compulsive gambler, introspective and melancholic; given to epileptic seizures; sentenced to a Gulag and forced to serve in a Russian regiment; chronically broke and peripatetic; variously lionized and demonized by his critics and supporters -- there's enough material in Dostoevsky's life for a five volume biography, which, written over a 30 year period, Frank provides.
Of course he has a lot to work with: Dostoevsky left reams of material, including diaries, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. His collected works, in Russian, run to 30 volumes. Frank makes ample use of this material, especially in his analysis of Dostoevsky's major works in this period, "Crime and Punishment," "The Idiot," and "The Devils." Like a bipolar person, Dostoevsky swung from deep depression to exalted heights. He could plumb the depths of human depravity one minute, and celebrate the heights of the human spirit the next.
An example is one of his frequent gambling binges. "(The letter) also contains a frank admission of his recent gambling escapades, which Dostoevsky explains, in his usual fashion, in terms of the lure of freeing himself from debt in one miraculous stroke. "In one fell swoop to get out of all these proceedings with his creditors, provide for myself for a time and for my family. "But Dostoevsky is honest enough to add that gambling contains its own vertiginous attraction ("You know how that draws you in") (Frank, P. 224)
Frank's scholarship is exemplary, his writing lucid, and his subject mesmerizing.
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