In the mid-1950s, the young critic Joseph Frank, having been invited to give the Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton, settled on the then fashionable topic "Existential Themes in Modern Literature." Since Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre both regarded Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" (1864) as a central text of existentialism, Mr. Frank naturally plunged into an intensive study of that novella. His fascination with its anguished protagonist—who on the first page brazenly proclaims "I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man"—eventually led the critic to learn Russian and to plan a short book on the sociological and ideological roots of the Underground Man's self-hatred. But as Mr. Frank's fascination with 19th-century Russian culture and social thought grew, so did his project. In 1976 there appeared "Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849," followed by four further volumes of critical biography, culminating in 2002 with "Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881."
[BRLEDE-foto2_DV] Alamy (2); The Granger Collection, New York (signature)
Fyodor Dostoevsky's grave at the Alexander Nevsky monastery in St. Petersburg. Insets: The author's signature and a photo of him in 1879.
All five installments of this work—invariably and rightly described as magisterial—have now been reduced to a single massive volume. Editor Mary Petrusewicz cut the full text by roughly two-thirds, and the result was then read and approved by Mr. Frank, now 91 and a distinguished professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at both Stanford and Princeton. "Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time" thus immediately becomes the essential one-volume commentary on the intellectual dynamics and artistry of this great novelist's impassioned, idea-driven fiction.
Naturally, some details have been sacrificed in the abridgment. For instance, in the third volume, "The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865," Mr. Frank spends several pages discussing the possible influence on Dostoevsky of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel "Mary Barton" and Edgar Allan Poe's short stories (especially "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat"). In this condensation all the Gaskell material has been dropped even though the plot of her novel about industrial suffering, murder and conscience almost certainly influenced "Crime and Punishment" (1866) and "The Brothers Karamazov" (1881). Happily, Princeton University Press promises to keep all five volumes of the full biography in print.
The poet Allen Tate, introducing Mr. Frank's first book, a collection of essays on modern literature titled "The Widening Gyre" (1963), described him as "a philosophical critic with an international point of view." Given such a background, Mr. Frank has avoided the usual sort of literary biography, the kind that strings together facts and anecdotes from a writer's public life. Instead he keeps his attention focused on Dostoevsky as an artist and thinker, one whose work represents a dialogue with the political, cultural, religious and social movements of his time. As Mr. Frank writes: "The personal entanglements of the figures in the novels, though depicted with often melodramatic intensity, cannot really be understood unless we grasp how their actions are intertwined with ideological motivations." His "Dostoevsky" is thus a hybrid of biography, criticism and intellectual history.
Dostoevsky's own life (1821-81) was itself quite full of "melodramatic intensity." His father, who had pulled himself up from poverty to become a doctor, was probably murdered by the family's own serfs. The young Dostoevsky, following the success of his first novel, "Poor Folk" (1846), joined the progressive Petrashevsky Circle, whose members were eventually arrested for treason and sentenced to be shot. Pardon was granted only when the first three of the condemned were actually standing before the firing squad; Dostoevsky was waiting his turn in the next group of three. Instead of being executed, he was shipped off to four years at hard labor in Siberia—an experience chronicled in "The House of the Dead" (1862). He did not return to St. Petersburg until a full decade had passed, during which time he had become a populist, a believing Christian and a deeper, more serious artist.
n subsequent years Dostoevsky grew increasingly religious, politically conservative, xenophobic and Slavophile, convinced that Russia's destiny was to lead the world back to God. Already suffering from epilepsy and emphysema, the novelist steadily wrecked his health with overwork. He finished "The Brothers Karamazov" just a month before he died at age 59.
As Mr. Frank shows, Dostoevsky brilliantly dramatized the ideas of his time, especially by juxtaposing the social romanticism of the 1840s—the era of the cultivated Russian daydreamers sometimes called "superfluous men"—and the nihilism of the 1860s, associated with the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Sergey Nechaev (the probable co-authors of the notorious "Catechism of a Revolutionary"). But Dostoevsky was also constantly measuring his own work against that of the cosmopolitan Ivan Turgenev, whose "Fathers and Children" had electrified the country. Moreover, he was distinctly envious of the gentrified, landowning Tolstoy, going so far as to disparage "Anna Karenina" and its popularity: "I can't understand what they're all so excited about." Surprisingly, these two giants of Russian fiction never met.
Mr. Frank devotes individual chapters to each of Dostoevsky's major books—besides those already mentioned, they include "The Idiot" (1869), "Demons," also known as "The Possessed" (1872), and the journalistic "Diary of a Writer" (1873-1881). He stresses Dostoevsky's grotesque sense of comedy, his vision of the family as a battleground for psychic domination, his belief in the sanctifying power of suffering and his characteristic atmosphere of "fantastic realism," through which 19th-century Russian life comes to resemble Greek tragedy or biblical drama. These explicatory chapters bring to bear the critic's subtle analytic intelligence, as well as his immense learning. Still, one may sometimes disagree. For example, Mr. Frank rather casually sums up Kirillov's suicide (in "Demons") as "the self-negation and self-refutation of his own grandiose ideas." This may be true, but it rather downplays the sheer psychological drama of Kirillov's last night, as he struggles against his overwhelming desire to live. To me, there is no more harrowing scene in all of 19th-century fiction.
But then Dostoevsky is the most harrowing novelist in the world. As Mr. Frank says: "It is this union of uncommon social sensitivity with agonized religious probings that gives his work its properly tragic character and its unique place in the history of the novel." "The Brothers Karamazov" certainly belongs on the same shelf as the Book of Job and "The Oresteia," "King Lear" and "Paradise Lost." Such works are fundamentally psycho machias— representations of battles within the soul, titanic struggles between good and evil, with human salvation and redemption hanging in the balance.
After all, when you read Dostoevsky, you know that he isn't writing for the sake of social advancement, intellectual vanity or even material gain (though he always needed money, often desperately). He is writing because the Lord has touched his tongue with a blazing coal, and he must go forth and bear witness. His detractors, like Vladimir Nabokov, maintain that Dostoevsky is vulgar, sentimental and melodramatic. In fact, he makes most other writers seem precious, fussy and minor. Here, says Dostoevsky, is the human heart, racked by suffering and pain, lost in the wilderness of this fallen world, hungry for God. Until we rest in Him, our lives are simply ordeals, feverish nightmares, torment.
Today we aren't used to novelists openly espousing such ardent religious belief. But faith in Christ formed the core of Dostoevsky's being and from it, as Mr. Frank shows, he confronted what he viewed as the ills and horrors—the demons—of his time. He took ideas personally, a friend once said, and actually "felt thought." His "Notes From Underground" pushes the prospect of Benthamite utilitarianism to its limits—and reveals that utter misery is what results when you allow the head to dominate the heart. That haunting book is, as Mr. Frank substantiates, a riposte to N.G. Chernyshevsky's arguments about the virtues of "rational egoism." "Demons" confirms that nihilism uses political expedience as the cover for satanic evil, deliberate cruelty and the "necessary" murder. All of Dostoevsky's greatest characters—the conscience-stricken ax-murderer Raskolnikov, the dandyish revolutionary Stavrogin, the atheistical Ivan Karamazov— reveal souls chafed and lacerated by theories. And because of Joseph Frank we know precisely what those theories are.
Still, Fyodor Dostoevsky wouldn't be remembered today if he were nothing but a polemicist or a prophet. He was, above all, a dramatist of ideas, often making his devils far more charismatic than his meekly holy characters, such as the saintly prostitute Sonya or Prince Myshkin (in "The Idiot"). "I see," says Svidrigailov, the derisive and cynical debauchee in "Crime and Punishment," "that I may strike some people as a romantic figure." To start one of Dostoevsky's great novels is to experience what the author himself once called "mystic terror": The books read like hallucinations or the frantic dreams of madmen, and in them all our darkest, most irrational impulses are acted out.
That said, this great psychological novelist didn't create ex nihilo. His work, which transcends his time, is also deeply grounded in it. To understand Dostoevsky's often savage satire or nightmarish visions or just the conversations among the Karamazov brothers, one needs to grasp not only the text but also the ideological context. To both of these there is no better guide than Joseph Frank.
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