Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859

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Princeton University Press, 1983 - Biography & Autobiography - 320 pages

Volume two of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time

Joseph Frank’s award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the Russian novelist in any language and one of the greatest literary biographies ever written. In this monumental work, Frank blends biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism to illuminate Dostoevsky’s works and set them in their personal, historical, and 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.

This volume opens with the detention of the bookish young writer for membership in the radical Petrashevsky Circle and closes with his return to the capital ten years later as an ex-convict and former soldier who now proclaims himself an ardent supporter of the czar and the Russian imperial dynasty.

 

Contents

The Petrashevsky Affair
6
A Wealth of Life
18
Clever Independent Cunning Stubborn
32
The Incident in Semenovsky Square
49
First Impressions
69
A World of Moral Horror
87
A Russian Patriot
104
The Peasant Marey
116
Private Dostoevsky
175
An Influential Friend
184
A Knight in Female Clothing
200
A Russian Heart
223
Weak and Strong Types
241
Literary Projects
257
The Siberian Novellas
266
Homecoming
290

A New Vision
128
Monsters in Their Misery
146
A Thirst for Knowledge
165
Abbreviations
305
Copyright

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About the author (1983)

Joseph Frank (1918–2013) 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.

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