Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871

Joseph Frank

Published by Princeton University Press 1995

Dostoevsky

The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871

Joseph Frank

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691209371

Overview
Contents

About this book

This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. All the while, he worried that his recurrent epileptic attacks were impairing his literary capacities. His enforced exile intensified not only his love for his native land but also his abhorrence of the doctrines of Russian Nihilism--which he saw as an alien European importation infecting the Russian psyche. Two novels of this period were thus an attempt to conjure this looming spectre of moral-social disintegration, while The Idiot offered an image of Dostoevsky's conception of the Russian Christian ideal that he hoped would take its place.

Author / Editor information

Joseph Frank is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. For Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, Frank won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to the previous volumes of Dostoevsky, he is the author of Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (Princeton).

Reviews

"[Frank's] high contribution is to chronicle the life and elaborate the social-political-cultural matrix in which to consider the writings, and to do this more thoroughly and comprehensively than has been previously done."---Stephen Jan Parker, The New York Times Book Review

"In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote-personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other-Frank has succeeded triumphantly."---J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

"For a reader ready to grapple with the most powerful ideas and feelings in Dostoevsky's extraordinary life and work, this book is a godsend."---Irwin Weil, The, Washington Post Book World

"[Dostoevsky] is the genius who has done the most to illumine nineteenth-century Russian psychology and to make the terrifying problems of atheism and nihilism part of the modernism we still grapple with. Frank's magisterial five-volume study of his life and work ... salutes the grandeur of Dostoevsky's project."---Lesley Chamberlain, The [London] Times

"Winner of the 1995 Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa"

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
PREFACE Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
TRANSLITERATION AND TEXTS Publicly Available Download PDF	xv
PART I: SOME "STRANGE, 'UNFINISHED' IDEAS"
Chapter 1: Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
Chapter 2: "The Unhappiest of Mortals" Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
Chapter 3: Khlestakov in Wiesbaden Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Chapter 4: "Our Poor Little Defenseless Boys and Girls" Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	42
Chapter 5: The Sources of Crime and Punishment Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	60
Chapter 6: From Novella to Novel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
Chapter 7: A Reading of Crime and Punishment Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
PART II: REMARRIAGE
Chapter 8: "A Little Diamond" Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
Chapter 9: The Gambler Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	170
Chapter 10: Escape and Exile Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	184
Chapter 11: Turgenev and Baden-Baden Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
Chapter 12: Geneva: Life among the Exiles Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
PART III: A RUSSIAN IDEAL
Chapter 13: In Search of a Novel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
Chapter 14: "A Perfectly Beautiful Man" Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	256
Chapter 15: An Inconsolable Father Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	276
Chapter 16: Across the Alps Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	294
Chapter 17: The Idiot Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	316
Chapter 18: Historical Visions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	342
PART IV: THE PAMPHLET AND THE POEM
Chapter 19: The Life of a Great Sinner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365
Chapter 20: The Eternal Husband Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	382
Chapter 21: Fathers, Sons, and Stavrogin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	396
Chapter 22: Exile's Return Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	413
Chapter 23: History and Myth in The Devils: I Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	435
Chapter 24: History and Myth in The Devils: II Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	453
Chapter 25: The Book of the Impostors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	472
Chapter 26: Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	499
ABBREVIATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	503
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	505
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	517

Language: English
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 544
Illustrations
- Other: 15 halftones
Keywords: Crime and Punishment; The Devils; Anna Grigoryevna; Feodor Mikhailovich; Egoism; The Idiot; Isaev; Pavel; Kashpirev; Nechaev affair; Radical ideology; Alexander II (tsar); Dame aux camélias; La (Dumas); Fantastic realism; The Gambler; Sofya Ivanova; Maikov; Apollon; Moral conscience; Narrative technique; Prince Myshkin; Raskolnikov; Raznochinets; Slavophilism; Triumph of Death; Uncle’s Dream

eBook

Published: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 9780691209371