Dostoevsky: The seeds of revolt, 1821-1849. 1

Joseph Frank

Princeton University Press, 1979 - Biography & Autobiography - 401 pages

The term "biography" seems insufficiently capacious to describe the singular achievement of Joseph Frank's five-volume study of the life of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. One critic, writing upon the publication of the final volume, casually tagged the series as the ultimate work on Dostoevsky "in any language, and quite possibly forever."

Frank himself had not originally intended to undertake such a massive work. The endeavor began in the early 1960s as an exploration of Dostoevsky's fiction, but it later became apparent to Frank that a deeper appreciation of the fiction would require a more ambitious engagement with the writer's life, directly caught up as Dostoevsky was with the cultural and political movements of mid- and late-nineteenth-century Russia. Already in his forties, Frank undertook to learn Russian and embarked on what would become a five-volume work comprising more than 2,500 pages. The result is an intellectual history of nineteenth-century Russia, with Dostoevsky's mind as a refracting prism.

The volumes have won numerous prizes, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.

What people are saying

Review: Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 (Dostoevsky biography #1)

User Review  - Bar Shirtcliff - Goodreads

I gratefully collected this at the post office today, and have done almost nothing but read this book, today. Best staycation ever! This is a wonderful book by an erudite historian who happens to be ...

Review: Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky biography #1)

User Review  - Amy - Goodreads

Heavier than what I was looking for, but not in a bad way. Lots of details and commentary on the people who influenced the young Dostoevsky.

Contents

• The Family: 6
• Childhood Boyhood Youth: 23
• The Religious Background: 42
• The Cultural Background: 54
• The Academy of Engineers: 69
• A Marvellous Exalted Being: 92
• The Two Romanticisms: 101
• The Gogol Period I: 113
• The Gogol Period II: 127
• Poor Folk: 137
• Belinsky and His Pleiade: 159
• Belinsky and Dostoevsky I: 172
• Belinsky and Dostoevsky II: 182
• The Beketov Circle: 199
• The Petersburg Feuilletons: 217
• The Petrashevsky Circle: 239
• Dostoevsky and Speshnev: 258
• The PalmDurov Circle: 273
• The Double: 295
• Petersburg Grotesques: 313
• Reality and the Dreamer: 332
• Netotchka Nezvanova: 348
• Envoi: 365
• Freuds CaseHistory of Dostoevsky: 379
• Index: 393

About the author

Joseph Frank is the author of an award-winning multivolume biography of Dostoevsky.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Dostoevsky: The seeds of revolt, 1821-1849. 1; Volume 1 of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank; Volume 473 of Princeton paperbacks
• Author: Joseph Frank
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1979
• ISBN: 0691013551, 9780691013558
• Length: 401 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary; Literary Criticism / Russian & Former Soviet Union