Dostoevsky
Authors: Joseph Frank
DOSTOEVSKY
A Writer in His time
JOSEPH FRANK
edited by
Mary Petrusewicz
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,
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All Rights Reserved
Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2012
Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15599-9
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows
Frank, Joseph, 1918–
Dostoevsky : a writer in his time / Joseph Frank.
p. cm.
Abridged ed. of author’s work in 5 v.: Dostoevsky. c1976–2002.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-12819-1 (acid-free paper) 1. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881. 2. Novelists, Russian—19th century—Biography. 3. Russia—Intellectual life—1801–1917. I. Title.
PG3328.F75 2010
891.73′3—dc22
[B] 2009001418
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in
Adobe Garamond
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Frontispiece: The bust of Dostoevsky on his grave
Parched with the spirit’s thirst, I crossed
An endless desert sunk in gloom,
And a six-winged seraph came
Where the tracks met and I stood lost.
Fingers light as dream he laid
Upon my lids; I opened wide
My eagle eyes, and gazed around.
He laid his fingers on my ears
And they were filled with roaring sound:
I heard the music of the spheres,
The flight of angels through the skies,
The beasts that crept beneath the sea,
The heady uprush of the vine;
And, like a lover kissing me,
He rooted out this tongue of mine
Fluent in lies and vanity;
He tore my fainting lips apart
And, with his right hand steeped in blood,
He armed me with a serpent’s dart;
With his bright sword he split my breast;
My heart leapt to him with a bound;
A glowing livid coal he pressed
Into the hollow of the wound.
There in the desert I lay dead.
And God called out to me and said:
“Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see,
And let my words be seen and heard
By all who turn aside from me.
And burn them with my fiery word.”
—A. S. Pushkin, “The Prophet”
trans. D. M. Thomas
Preface: Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849
3 The Religious and Cultural Background
4 The Academy of Military Engineers
11 Belinsky and Dostoevsky: II
12 The Beketov and Petrashevsky Circles
The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859
14 The Peter-and-Paul Fortress
The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865
22 An Aesthetics of Transcendence
27
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
28 An Emancipated Woman, A Tormented Lover
The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871
42 Fathers, Sons, and Stavrogin
The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881
47
Narodnichestvo
: Russian Populism
51
The Diary of a Writer
, 1876–1877
54 Rebellion and the Grand Inquisitor
57 Controversies and Conclusions
58
The Brothers Karamazov
: Books 1–4
59
The Brothers Karamazov
: Books 5–6
60
The Brothers Karamazov
: Books 7–12
Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations are from
Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky v portretakh, illyustratsiyakh, dokumentakh
, ed. V. S. Nechaeva (Moscow, 1972).
Frontispiece
The bust of Dostoevsky on his grave
3. A government courier on a mission
4. The Academy of Military Engineers
6. Feodor’s older brother, M. M. Dostoevsky, in 1847
8. M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky in 1840
10. The Peter-and-Paul Fortress
11. The mock execution of the Petrashevtsy
13. Dostoevsky in uniform, 1858
14. Nikolay Strakhov in the 1850s
15. Apollon Grigoryev in the 1850s
16. Mikhail Dostoevsky’s home and the offices of
Time
19. Main hall of the Crystal Palace. From
Scientific American
, March 19, 1851.
20. Apollinaria Suslova. From Dominique Arban et al.,
Dostoïevski
(Paris, 1971)
21. Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, ca. 1863
22. Hans Holbein the Younger,
Dead Christ
(1521–1522)
24. Dostoevsky in 1872, by V. G. Perov
25. A page from Dostoevsky’s notebooks for
Demons
27. Tolstoy in 1877, by I. N. Kramskoy
29. A page from the manuscript of
The Brothers Karamazov
30. Dostoevsky on his bier, by I. N. Kramskoy
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
Since the present volume is a condensation of the five that I have already published on the life and works of Dostoevsky, I should like to acquaint my new readers with the point of view from which they were written. My approach arose primarily from a troubling sense that important aspects of Dostoevsky’s work had been overlooked, or at least not accorded sufficient importance, in the considerable secondary literature devoted to his career. The major perspective of these studies derived from his personal history, and this had been so spectacular that it was almost irresistible for biographers to recount its peripeties at length. No other Russian writer of his stature could equal the range of his familiarity with both the depths and heights of Russian society—a range that included four years spent as a convict living side by side with peasant criminals, and then, at the end of his life, invitations to dine with younger members of the family of Tsar Alexander II, who, it was believed, might benefit from his conversation. It is quite understandable that such a life, in all its fascinating particularities, should have furnished the background against which Dostoevsky’s works were initially viewed and interpreted.
The more I read Dostoevsky’s novels and stories, however, not to mention his journalism, both literary and political (his
Diary of a Writer
was the most widely circulated monthly publication ever published in Russia), the more it seemed to me that a conventional biographical point of view could not do justice to the complexities of his creations. To be sure, while Dostoevsky’s characters struggle with the psychological and sentimental problems that provide the substance of all novels, more important, his books are also inspired by the ideological doctrines of his time. Such doctrines, particularly in his major works, furnish the chief motivations for the often bizarre, eccentric, and occasionally murderous behavior of characters like Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
, or both Stavrogin and Kirillov in
Demons
. 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.
It thus seemed to me, when I set out to write my own work on Dostoevsky, that its perspective should be shifted, and that the purely personal biography
should no longer dominate the explanatory context in which he was creating. Much less space is thus given in my books to the details of Dostoevsky’s private life and much more to the clash of various ideas prevailing during the period in which he lived. The most perceptive reader of my first four volumes, the much lamented and gifted novelist and critic David Foster Wallace, remarked that “Ellman’s
James Joyce
, pretty much the standard by which most literary bios are measured, doesn’t go into anything like Frank’s detail on ideology or politics or social theory.” This is not to say that I ignore Dostoevsky’s private life, but it remains linked to other aspects of his era that provide it with a much larger significance. Indeed, one way of defining Dostoevsky’s originality is to see in it this ability to integrate the personal with the major social-political and cultural issues of his day.