Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

The author's 2,500-page, five-volume account of the Russian writer's life has been abridged and condensed into a single volume, which carefully preserves the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history and literary criticism.

List of I llustrations xi

Preface: Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time xiii

Acknowledgments xix

Transliteration xxi

Abbreviations xxiii

PART I: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849

Chapter 1: Prelude 3

Chapter 2: The Family 5

Chapter 3: The Religious and Cultural Background 23

Chapter 4: The Academy of Military Engineers 38

Chapter 5: The Two Romanticisms 51

Chapter 6: The Gogol Period 61

Chapter 7: Poor Folk 76

Chapter 8: Dostoevsky and the Pl