Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871

by Joseph Frank

Overview

This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. All the while, he worried that his recurrent epileptic attacks were impairing his literary capacities. His enforced exile intensified not only his love for his native land but also his abhorrence of the doctrines of Russian Nihilism--which he saw as an alien European importation infecting the Russian psyche. Two novels of this period were thus an attempt to conjure this looming spectre of moral-social disintegration, while The Idiot offered an image of Dostoevsky's conception of the Russian Christian ideal that he hoped would take its place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691209371
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Joseph Frank is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. For Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, Frank won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to the previous volumes of Dostoevsky, he is the author of Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (Princeton).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Transliteration and Texts xv
PART I: SOME "STRANGE, 'UNFINISHED' IDEAS"
Chapter 1: Introduction 3
Chapter 2: "The Unhappiest of Mortals" 9
Chapter 3: Khlestakov in Wiesbaden 25
Chapter 4: "Our Poor Little Defenseless Boys and Girls" 42
Chapter 5: The Sources of Crime and Punishment 60
Chapter 6: From Novella to Novel 80
Chapter 7: A Reading of Crime and Punishment 96
PART II: REMARRIAGE
Chapter 8: "A Little Diamond" 151
Chapter 9: The Gambler 170
Chapter 10: Escape and Exile 184
Chapter 11: Turgenev and Baden-Baden 204
Chapter 12: Geneva: Life among the Exiles 223
PART III: A RUSSIAN IDEAL
Chapter 13: In Search of a Novel 241
Chapter 14: "A Perfectly Beautiful Man" 256
Chapter 15: An Inconsolable Father 276
Chapter 16: Across the Alps 294
Chapter 17: The Idiot 316
Chapter 18: Historical Visions 342
PART IV: THE PAMPHLET AND THE POEM
Chapter 19: The Life of a Great Sinner 365
Chapter 20: The Eternal Husband 382
Chapter 21: Fathers, Sons, and Stavrogin 396
Chapter 22: Exile's Return 413
Chapter 23: History and Myth in The Devils: I 435
Chapter 24: History and Myth in The Devils: ii 453
Chapter 25: The Book of the Impostors 472
Chapter 26: Conclusion 499
Abbreviations 503
Notes 505
Index 517

Editorial Reviews

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 expos 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. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The three previous volumes of Frank's biography (The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, LJ 9/1/76; The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, LJ 11/15/83; and The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865, LJ 3/15/87) have received high praise as well as prestigious awards, and the current volume merits similar reception. Frank has aimed to keep Dostoevsky's works "constantly in the foreground...rather than accessory to the life...to furnish the reader with a context, drawn from the writer's personal life, as well as from the social, cultural, literary, and philosophical background... that will help toward a better understanding of the work." This he has done for the period in which Dostoevsky produced three major novels (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils) and two novellas that rank among his best. With admirable balance and lucidity, Frank delineates the trying personal circumstances (poverty, the death of his first child, his gambling mania) as well as the influence of currents such as Russian nihilism on the works as they developed in Dostoevsky's notebooks. A rich and worthwhile biography for scholar and general reader alike.-Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.

Library Journal

Like Shakespeare's Hamlet or Dante's Beatrice, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov has entered the literary imagination as a figure of irresistible force. In this fourth (and penultimate) volume of his masterly biography of Dostoevsky, Frank explores the origins of the creative power that has made Raskolnikov a haunting presence in world literature ever since the publication of "Crime and Punishment" in 1866. The circumstances of Dostoevsky's life--unrelenting creditors, importuning relatives, disabling fits of epilepsy, disappointing moves across Europe, and exciting but disastrous episodes of gambling--all make the triumph of his creative talents even more astounding. Yet the publication of "Crime and Punishment" meant the end of neither adversity nor artistic vitality. Although still dogged by penury, illness, and political controversy, Dostoevsky wrote two more brilliant novels ("The Idiot" and "The Devils") and two enduring novellas ("The Gambler" and "The Eternal Husband") with astonishing speed. Painstakingly detailed, the analyses of Dostoevsky's social, political, and personal lives never obscure the central concern: his magnificent art. Above all, a "literary" biography, this volume sheds light on the complex themes and pioneering techniques of Dostoevsky's fiction. Nuanced and insightful, the book well deserves shelf space alongside the psychological masterpieces it illuminates.

Bryce Christensen

Winner of the 1995 Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa

From the Publisher

For a reader ready to grapple with the most powerful ideas and feelings in Dostoevsky's extraordinary life and work, this book is a godsend.

Washington Post Book World

[Frank's] high contribution is to chronicle the life and elaborate the social-political-cultural matrix in which to consider the writings, and to do this more thoroughly and comprehensively than has been previously done.

The New York Times Book Review - Stephen Jan Parker

In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote-personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other-Frank has succeeded triumphantly.

The New York Review of Books - J. M. Coetzee

[Dostoevsky] is the genius who has done the most to illumine nineteenth-century Russian psychology and to make the terrifying problems of atheism and nihilism part of the modernism we still grapple with. Frank's magisterial five-volume study of his life and work ... salutes the grandeur of Dostoevsky's project.

The [London] Times - Lesley Chamberlain

For a reader ready to grapple with the most powerful ideas and feelings in Dostoevsky's extraordinary life and work, this book is a godsend.

The "Washington Post Book World in Weil

[Frank's] high contribution is to chronicle the life and elaborate the social-political-cultural matrix in which to consider the writings, and to do this more thoroughly and comprehensively than has been previously done.
— Stephen Jan Parker

The New York Times Book Review

In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote-personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other-Frank has succeeded triumphantly.
— J. M. Coetzee

The New York Review of Books

[Dostoevsky] is the genius who has done the most to illumine nineteenth-century Russian psychology and to make the terrifying problems of atheism and nihilism part of the modernism we still grapple with. Frank's magisterial five-volume study of his life and work ... salutes the grandeur of Dostoevsky's project.
— Lesley Chamberlain

The [London] Times