Here, from 'An Honest Thief,' is a fascinating quote that was later eliminated by Dostoevsky because of one critic's stupidly negative response: My Emelyan, if he had stayed alive, wouldn't have been a man but some sort of trash to spit on. Fortunately, Frank returns after his author's arrest by the Tsarist officials to the minor (but interesting) works he was working on during the period of his socialist venture. It was by reading David Foster Wallace's review of the series reprinted in his collection Consider the Lobster that I decided I would read the series and, along with it, the novels and stories of the great Russian writer as they came up in Joseph Frank's series.ĭostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 is excellent except for a sag several chapters long dealing with Dostoevsky's attendance at various political/socialist/Fourierist circles after the disappointment's following the publication of Poor Folk. This is the first of five volumes tracing in exhaustive detail the influences working on Fyodor Dostoevsky during his literary career. The volumes have won numerous prizes, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. The result is an intellectual history of nineteenth-century Russia, with Dostoevsky's mind as a refracting prism. Already in his forties, Frank undertook to learn Russian and embarked on what would become a five-volume work comprising more than 2,500 pages.

The endeavor began in the early 1960s as an exploration of Dostoevsky's fiction, but it later became apparent to Frank that a deeper appreciation of the fiction would require a more ambitious engagement with the writer's life, directly caught up as Dostoevsky was with the cultural and political movements of mid- and late-nineteenth-century Russia.

One critic, writing upon the publication of the final volume, casually tagged the series as the ultimate work on Dostoevsky 'in any language, and quite possibly forever.'įrank himself had not originally intended to undertake such a massive work. The term 'biography' seems insufficiently capacious to describe the singular achievement of Joseph Frank's five-volume study of the life of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky biography joseph frank