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Dostoevsky #5
Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881
This fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's justly celebrated literary and cultural biography of Dostoevsky renders with a rare intelligence and grace the last decade of the writer's life, the years in which he wrote A Raw Youth, Diary of a Writer, and his crowning triumph: The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky's final years at last won him the universal approval toward which he had always aspired. While describing his idiosyncratic relationship to the Russian state, Frank also details Doestoevsky's continuing rivalries with Turgenev and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky's appearance at the Pushkin Festival in June 1880, which preceded his death by one year, marked the apotheosis of his career--and of his life as a spokesman for the Russian spirit. There he delivered his famous speech on Pushkin before an audience stirred to a feverish emotional pitch: "Ours is universality attained not by the sword, but by the force of brotherhood and of our brotherly striving toward the reunification of mankind." This is the Dostoevsky who has entered the patrimony of world literature, though he was not always capable of living up to such exalted ideals.
The writer's death in St. Petersburg in January of 1881 concludes this unparalleled literary biography--one truly worthy of Dostoevsky's genius and of the remarkable time and place in which he lived.
Dostoevsky's final years at last won him the universal approval toward which he had always aspired. While describing his idiosyncratic relationship to the Russian state, Frank also details Doestoevsky's continuing rivalries with Turgenev and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky's appearance at the Pushkin Festival in June 1880, which preceded his death by one year, marked the apotheosis of his career--and of his life as a spokesman for the Russian spirit. There he delivered his famous speech on Pushkin before an audience stirred to a feverish emotional pitch: "Ours is universality attained not by the sword, but by the force of brotherhood and of our brotherly striving toward the reunification of mankind." This is the Dostoevsky who has entered the patrimony of world literature, though he was not always capable of living up to such exalted ideals.
The writer's death in St. Petersburg in January of 1881 concludes this unparalleled literary biography--one truly worthy of Dostoevsky's genius and of the remarkable time and place in which he lived.
784 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Joseph Frank
144 books118 followersJoseph Frank was professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford and Princeton. The five volumes of his Dostoevsky biography won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, two James Russell Lowell Prizes, and two Christian Gauss Awards, and have been translated into numerous languages.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
July 30, 2019
Lemme get out all those hoary old reviewing adages out of the way, like "a crowning achievement", "a tour de force", "sexually compromising", et cetera.
If you've read a lick of any of the five volumes of Frank's magisterial, seminal (gross!) biography/literary study of Dostoevsky, then you know what you're in for: more of the awesome. Frank takes you through the last decade of Dosty's curtailed life. As always, Frank tends to focus more closely on the literary output, and some folks might want more of the personal nitty-gritty, but Dost was so busy fighting off lame-ass, envious literary peers and emphysema (often in the same breath!), so there wasn't much time for soap opera shit.
As you can probably guess, much of this longest volume's length is taken up by a penetrating study of The Brothers Karamazov...140 goddamn pages. But Frank gives a lot of space to Diary of a Writer, too, in its various incarnations, and a couple of chapters just to the monumental "Pushkin" speech. Just as in the other volumes, where Frank really shines is placing Dosty in his intellectual and cultural milieu, showing the evolution of his agonizing appeal from his fellow man for a religiously-steeped moralism and the doctrine of free will, and how that central idea is pivotal in his novels.
I could literally go on for hours about this concluding volume, and all the others as well, but I won't.
If you've read a lick of any of the five volumes of Frank's magisterial, seminal (gross!) biography/literary study of Dostoevsky, then you know what you're in for: more of the awesome. Frank takes you through the last decade of Dosty's curtailed life. As always, Frank tends to focus more closely on the literary output, and some folks might want more of the personal nitty-gritty, but Dost was so busy fighting off lame-ass, envious literary peers and emphysema (often in the same breath!), so there wasn't much time for soap opera shit.
As you can probably guess, much of this longest volume's length is taken up by a penetrating study of The Brothers Karamazov...140 goddamn pages. But Frank gives a lot of space to Diary of a Writer, too, in its various incarnations, and a couple of chapters just to the monumental "Pushkin" speech. Just as in the other volumes, where Frank really shines is placing Dosty in his intellectual and cultural milieu, showing the evolution of his agonizing appeal from his fellow man for a religiously-steeped moralism and the doctrine of free will, and how that central idea is pivotal in his novels.
I could literally go on for hours about this concluding volume, and all the others as well, but I won't.
August 16, 2022
I began Vol 1 of this 5 Vol work in 2010, with the goal of reading everything Dostoevsky ever wrote (and much of what influenced him) along the way. That effort, while still ongoing, has been well worth the time expended. As for the 5 books by Frank, they deserve all the high praise they have received. Though I do think that for all his exhaustive knowledge of Dostoevsky the man, and his penetrating analysis of much of his work, Frank never really understood Dostoevsky’s religious vision. That I can say this and yet still giving each volume 5 stars, speaks to their status as utterly fascinating and indispensable resources, in service to the greatest novelist who has ever lived.
February 14, 2019
What a remarkable biography. I have been a Dostoevsky buff since the first time I read "The Brothers Karamazov" at sixteen and considered myself relatively well-versed in his opus. Nowhere close! These five volumes were informational to an amazing degree, and highly recommended for those wishing to delve into the context of Dostoevsky's novels and well as his premonitions of what would be Russia's fate in the XX century.
I've gone back to Dostoevsky over the years for many reasons - to get back to old loves, to understand Orthodoxy as part of my own heritage, and to remember that old adage of how the line of good and evil cuts straight through a man's heart. But what surprised me especially about this volume is how much one can learn from this man on how to live... with simplicity and grace, with raw intelligence, hard work and spiritual ideals to guide one's heart.
An unrivaled work! Motivates me to re-read all of Dostoevsky's novels.
I've gone back to Dostoevsky over the years for many reasons - to get back to old loves, to understand Orthodoxy as part of my own heritage, and to remember that old adage of how the line of good and evil cuts straight through a man's heart. But what surprised me especially about this volume is how much one can learn from this man on how to live... with simplicity and grace, with raw intelligence, hard work and spiritual ideals to guide one's heart.
An unrivaled work! Motivates me to re-read all of Dostoevsky's novels.
July 8, 2018
A fitting end to a monumental biography. I am grateful not only for Franks detailed account of Dostoevsky's life and philosophical leanings, but most especially for the analysis of the author's works themselves. While there is much to be troubled by in the non-fiction, I am as convinced as ever that Dostoevsky was a true genius, his contribution to the world one that continues to pay dividends (recognizing he would dislike that economic metaphor!).
September 13, 2016
You feel Frank beginning slowly becoming less enamoured of Dostoyevsky in this volume; the antisemitism of these years often seems too much for him to bear, often resulting in sentences which praise the work, while acting as curtly worded invectives against Dostoevsky's character. There is no point in finding fault in Frank's judgements on Dostoyevsky's political, polemical rhetoric found in the Diary of A Writer articles, the letters and the journals -- they're acute and thoughtful as always. Frank had no way avoiding the facts of the primary source record, which he drew from heavily since the very start of his project. It makes the triumphant tone of the last bio to be somewhat less, well, triumphant. Which in a way only seems apt in the case of an author who was greater than possibly any other at describing the specifics of the process of indecision, the process of mulling over, maybe even the greatest author to describe the process of thought period. Frank's grand project is the greatest imaginable tribute to this legacy. Put together, the five volumes are almost unbelievably good, almost too good to be true. Looking at Dostoevsky's own bibliography, with the Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground, I am struck by much the same feeling.
September 23, 2009
I had a difficult time finishing this, only because its last chapter is so moving and well-written. I've invested a good deal of time into these five biographies. It was painful to witness the death of such a warmly portrayed character.
The whole series is amazing, but this is the finest of JF's work. His analysis and approach brings to light Dostoevsky's reasoning and belief on irreproachable levels. With the help of the Writer's Diary and Dostoevsky's new-found fame, this volume reaches new heights that help us all to understand the great writer.
Next I'm beginning a nerdy chronological read/reread of everything Dostoevsky published. Thanks to Joseph Frank, I feel more capable of grasping and applying Dostoevsky's work....
The whole series is amazing, but this is the finest of JF's work. His analysis and approach brings to light Dostoevsky's reasoning and belief on irreproachable levels. With the help of the Writer's Diary and Dostoevsky's new-found fame, this volume reaches new heights that help us all to understand the great writer.
Next I'm beginning a nerdy chronological read/reread of everything Dostoevsky published. Thanks to Joseph Frank, I feel more capable of grasping and applying Dostoevsky's work....
July 12, 2008
The 5th and final vol. of Frank's bio; it covers his reading of Bros K. Even if you don't want to read the whole thing, it's worth the price to read F's gloss of that great novel.
Otherwise, see my review re Vol 2, The Years of Ordeal, for more general comments that apply to both volumes.
Otherwise, see my review re Vol 2, The Years of Ordeal, for more general comments that apply to both volumes.
November 25, 2020
I first encountered mention of Frank’s ambitious five-volume Dostoevsky biography when I picked up David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. I immediately read all the way through Wallace’s review of The Miraculous Years, the fourth volume in Frank’s biography. As soon as I read it, I knew that, at some point, I would have to tangle with this extraordinary set of books. I had been constantly returning to Dostoevsky over the course of my adult life, starting with an obsession I had developed with the author that was equal parts fascinating and frustrating when I was a teenager. I can still remember learning in eleventh-grade English—where I had first attempted to read Dostoevsky when I gave a speech in that class on The Brothers Karamazov—about New Criticism, which cautioned the reader to not go searching for unfounded meanings in a work of literature, by cheating and looking for keys to every novel in the life of the author. Though I didn’t adhere religiously to this principle, I still liked the idea of keeping everything neatly and tidily anchored to a given text, relying only on what I could bring to any given novel when I was reading it, and the ability to dismiss anything that didn’t resonate with me on the grounds that if I couldn’t find anything of meaning in a book, it was the fault of the book, and I bore no responsibility.
By the time I had read Wallace’s review, I was suffering from the pathological extremes of New Criticism. While a useful tool for making sure that grounds for any given interpretation, are in fact rooted in the text, if taken too far it can lead to an impoverished mindset to bring to any given text, wallowing in extreme subjectivity, and not enriching one’s understanding with any contextual information. I immediately resonated with Wallace’s diagnosis of so much of contemporary fiction as something that had given rise to solipsism and nihilism, and his prescription of Dostoevsky’s as a powerful antidote to such a condition. I too had realized that much contemporary fiction didn’t encourage people to live more meaningful lives, but to make books a never-ending evasion of meaning.
So, reading not only Dostoevsky’s novels—which I did as I made my way through each volume—but reading Frank’s commentary on those novels, was an invaluable reminder to me that books do not exist in a vacuum, for readers or for writers, and searching through other sources to help enrich our understanding of those works of art, which in turn further enriches one’s understanding of life, is by no means cheating. Dostoevsky’s life was a very meaningful one, and it reminds anyone who reads his books, that he firmly believed in everything he wrote, because he actually suffered and lived his life according to the values he instantiated in his greatest works.
Still, with all that being said, Dostoevsky was still a flawed person. This volume, more so than the four preceding volumes, illustrated that unflinchingly. Frank gives a full accounting, not just of Dostoevsky’s personal spats with fellow authors, but of his more deeply concerning flaws. Frank writes candidly of Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism, along with his dreams of Russia conquering Asia and bringing Orthodoxy to the unenlightened masses. But, resting uncomfortably cheek-by-jowl with such accounts are his unflagging commitment to his art, even at the expense of his health; his patient and impassioned interactions with the younger generation of intellectuals, who had often thought him their enemy; and his tender affection for his wife and children.
Frank relates how, when he was resting in his coffin, multiple people commented on the unbelievably peaceful look on his face: that of someone, who had fought the good fight and gone to his reward with a peaceful heart, free of bitterness. Reading about Dostoevsky’s life made his novels come alive for me with renewed richness and leaves me fortified in a time where meaninglessness and nihilism are as much a threat as they were in nineteenth-century Russia. This biography isn’t necessarily for everyone, and even for those who would find value in it, it is an arduous journey, but much like life, it is well worth the taking.
Final Score: 10/10
By the time I had read Wallace’s review, I was suffering from the pathological extremes of New Criticism. While a useful tool for making sure that grounds for any given interpretation, are in fact rooted in the text, if taken too far it can lead to an impoverished mindset to bring to any given text, wallowing in extreme subjectivity, and not enriching one’s understanding with any contextual information. I immediately resonated with Wallace’s diagnosis of so much of contemporary fiction as something that had given rise to solipsism and nihilism, and his prescription of Dostoevsky’s as a powerful antidote to such a condition. I too had realized that much contemporary fiction didn’t encourage people to live more meaningful lives, but to make books a never-ending evasion of meaning.
So, reading not only Dostoevsky’s novels—which I did as I made my way through each volume—but reading Frank’s commentary on those novels, was an invaluable reminder to me that books do not exist in a vacuum, for readers or for writers, and searching through other sources to help enrich our understanding of those works of art, which in turn further enriches one’s understanding of life, is by no means cheating. Dostoevsky’s life was a very meaningful one, and it reminds anyone who reads his books, that he firmly believed in everything he wrote, because he actually suffered and lived his life according to the values he instantiated in his greatest works.
Still, with all that being said, Dostoevsky was still a flawed person. This volume, more so than the four preceding volumes, illustrated that unflinchingly. Frank gives a full accounting, not just of Dostoevsky’s personal spats with fellow authors, but of his more deeply concerning flaws. Frank writes candidly of Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism, along with his dreams of Russia conquering Asia and bringing Orthodoxy to the unenlightened masses. But, resting uncomfortably cheek-by-jowl with such accounts are his unflagging commitment to his art, even at the expense of his health; his patient and impassioned interactions with the younger generation of intellectuals, who had often thought him their enemy; and his tender affection for his wife and children.
Frank relates how, when he was resting in his coffin, multiple people commented on the unbelievably peaceful look on his face: that of someone, who had fought the good fight and gone to his reward with a peaceful heart, free of bitterness. Reading about Dostoevsky’s life made his novels come alive for me with renewed richness and leaves me fortified in a time where meaninglessness and nihilism are as much a threat as they were in nineteenth-century Russia. This biography isn’t necessarily for everyone, and even for those who would find value in it, it is an arduous journey, but much like life, it is well worth the taking.
Final Score: 10/10
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December 7, 2023Finished at long last. It feels like wrapping up a bingeable TV series and wishing there was more to watch.
That being said Frank's cold warrior biases continue to unfortunately glare through here. At the end of the book he embarrassingly claims that Dostoevsky's funeral was the closest the country ever came to the esteemed author's vision of a united Russia. Frank's support for this claim? The funeral was attended by literary and intelligentsia figures from different feuding factions, now able to set aside their differences to mourn the passing of one of the greatest among them.
Never leaving politics out of the discussion, Frank directly intends this statement as a slight against the Russian Revolution. In his elitist cold warrior paradigm, a funeral attended by (admittedly numerous) mourning students and intellectuals is more of a united Russia than an entire class of millions upon millions of toiling people finally achieving literacy. Keep in mind that in Dostoevsky's time the literacy rate was so low among the peasantry (whose progress Frank correctly points out Dostoevsky championed to the end of his life), that the overwhelming majority of them would not have been to read Dostoevsky's novels even if they wanted to. Do these people count toward Frank's assessment of "the most united Russia would ever be?" The Russian Revolution made that literacy possible. It also made possible the mass production and distribution of Dostoevsky's collected works, a fact Frank gratefully acknowledges in an earlier volume.
So this kind of passive aggressive slander mires what is otherwise an obviously impressive work of scholarship.
But Western intellectuals have been in state of psychosis since 1917. They can't help themselves.
That being said Frank's cold warrior biases continue to unfortunately glare through here. At the end of the book he embarrassingly claims that Dostoevsky's funeral was the closest the country ever came to the esteemed author's vision of a united Russia. Frank's support for this claim? The funeral was attended by literary and intelligentsia figures from different feuding factions, now able to set aside their differences to mourn the passing of one of the greatest among them.
Never leaving politics out of the discussion, Frank directly intends this statement as a slight against the Russian Revolution. In his elitist cold warrior paradigm, a funeral attended by (admittedly numerous) mourning students and intellectuals is more of a united Russia than an entire class of millions upon millions of toiling people finally achieving literacy. Keep in mind that in Dostoevsky's time the literacy rate was so low among the peasantry (whose progress Frank correctly points out Dostoevsky championed to the end of his life), that the overwhelming majority of them would not have been to read Dostoevsky's novels even if they wanted to. Do these people count toward Frank's assessment of "the most united Russia would ever be?" The Russian Revolution made that literacy possible. It also made possible the mass production and distribution of Dostoevsky's collected works, a fact Frank gratefully acknowledges in an earlier volume.
So this kind of passive aggressive slander mires what is otherwise an obviously impressive work of scholarship.
But Western intellectuals have been in state of psychosis since 1917. They can't help themselves.
September 15, 2024
5 stars for everything minus the literary analysis. I've read Karamazov and loved it, and the analysis is probably good, but it's a slog to read through the summary/comment sections of this kind of writing—as is is the case with all of the book minus Demons, House of the Dead, and Crime and Punishment.
February 26, 2020
NICE BOOK.
August 15, 2023
Maintains the depth and pathos of the previous four volumes. If nothing else, the final examination of The Brothers Karamazov is worth reading the whole series that leads up to it.
May 18, 2012
This is the culmination of a five volume literary biography, the longest on any writer I am aware of - and the only one I have read of the five. It weighs in at more than 750 pages, and covers the last decade of Dostoevsky's life, when the writer's crusade for his vision for Russia really took off: he edited a "reactionary" newspaper, started his own (Writer's Diary), and wrote two novels, The Adolescent (aka A Raw Youth) and the blockbuster Brothers Karamazov, setting out his political stall defiantly and eloquently. All these have had relatively recent translations (more than one in the case of Brothers K), with the Writer's Diary an abridgement. At this length and in this amount of detail, the five volumes will certainly be the standard work for many years, if not forever.
All the same, it is hard not to get the feeling that by the time Frank got to this period, four volumes and a lot of tempestuous life on, that he was a bit tired of his subject, and that it shows. There are aspects of the life not probed as deeply as the length might imply, and crucial elements of the work are sailed through when they really needed more thorough treatment. The short period following the completion of Karamazov gets almost perfunctory treatment, and the "summing up" and "wash up" one would expect at the end of such a marathon account is cursory, when it shouldn't be. And in my mind's eye, I can see Dostoevsky scholars - which I am not - taking vigorous issue with some of Frank's summary assessments.
Even so, this is often a terrific read. For anyone not familiar with Dostoevsky, it will flesh out the literary work with the embattled life, and show the real human with all his flaws (there were more than a few). For those who know Dostoevsky's work, it will also be valuable; it is good enough that I will now probably go back and read the other four.
All the same, it is hard not to get the feeling that by the time Frank got to this period, four volumes and a lot of tempestuous life on, that he was a bit tired of his subject, and that it shows. There are aspects of the life not probed as deeply as the length might imply, and crucial elements of the work are sailed through when they really needed more thorough treatment. The short period following the completion of Karamazov gets almost perfunctory treatment, and the "summing up" and "wash up" one would expect at the end of such a marathon account is cursory, when it shouldn't be. And in my mind's eye, I can see Dostoevsky scholars - which I am not - taking vigorous issue with some of Frank's summary assessments.
Even so, this is often a terrific read. For anyone not familiar with Dostoevsky, it will flesh out the literary work with the embattled life, and show the real human with all his flaws (there were more than a few). For those who know Dostoevsky's work, it will also be valuable; it is good enough that I will now probably go back and read the other four.
June 19, 2010
Volume V of Frank's 2500-page literary biography. Thoroughly explores the last ten years of Dostoevsky's life, its events, the final development of his thought, and the publishing of that monumental literary work, the Brothers Karamazov. As throughout the biography, a full discussion on that work, and everything else he wrote during that time period.
May 30, 2011
I have spent almost a year reading this five volume academic work, i can only say it was an amazing journey, Prof. Frank writes so clearly and with such depth both in the study of Dostoevsky's work, his life, his time and Russia of the late 1800s. I may have to spend another year re-reading it.
January 13, 2011
he just has the gift
December 13, 2011
Beautiful finale, gripping and impressive.
November 29, 2012
Real Dimmsdale
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