I say skilfully abridged, as it’s not something I’d particularly relish having to do – shredding fifteen hundred pages off one’s own magnum opus – but there you go. Frank’s monumental, 2500-page work has herein been most skilfully abridged into one, very readable volume. In fact, many consider it to be one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century which is where this somewhat condensed version comes into play. In and of itself, this should come as absolutely no surprise, as his award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is already widely recognised as perhaps the finest biography of the troubled Russian genius in any language. These 932 pages are a linear, credible, not to mention chronological testament to this fact which, if nothing else, places the book’s author, Joseph Frank, upon the lone pedestal of great biographical writing (in relation to Dostoevsky). Lest we forget that of all the great Russian writers of the early nineteenth century, such as Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov and of course, the aforementioned Herzen Dostoevsky ”was the only one who did not come from a family belonging to the landed gentry.” A rather turbulent facet of both his life and his literary, social outlook, that subliminally, yet without question, always influenced the view he fully embraced so far as his own position as a writer was concerned. For who else in relatively modern literature, agonisingly questioned unto such a ponderous, yet poignantly heroic, religious endeavour, as Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky?Īs is written at the outset of chapter three, Dostoevsky – A Writer in His Time(‘The Religious and Cultural Background’): ”Dostoevsky’s contemporary, Alexander Herzen, remarks in his memoirs that ”nowhere does religion play so modest a role in education as in Russia.” Herzen was, of course, talking about the education of the male children of the landed or service aristocracy, whose parents had been raised for several generations on the culture of the French Enlightenment and for whom Voltaire had been a kind of patron saint.”

The above skeletal dissertation of surely one of the finest and most inventive writers ever, does much to trigger a cascade of didactic thought and the st(r)oking of one’s academic curiosity. As is written in the Preface of this simply uber sublime book: ”No modern writer rivals Dostoevsky in the grandeur of his presentation of eternal Christian dilemma – the fierceness of his attack on the presumed goodness of God, on the one hand, through Ivan Karamzov, and his attempt to counter it with the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and the preaching of Father Zosima on the other.”

Joseph frank's dostoevsky