The publication of this volume marks the completion of Joseph Frank’s enormous biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a work which he has spent half a lifetime in writing. ‘Monumental’ is the standard clichZ for such an enterprise, and Frank’s is certainly that. The scale of the work is due mainly to the fact that it sets out to be not just a biography, but a work of literary criticism and a social and intellectual history of 19th-century Russia. This would be a marvellous achievement if it could be done. Dostoevsky’s world is not easily accessible even to those who have read widely in its literature, and his ideas are certainly not self-explanatory.
Dostoevsky was born in 1821 into a family that was legally classified as noble but would not have ranked as such by any other standard. His father was an army doctor and his grandfather a provincial clergyman. He himself set out to be a professional writer, still not a wholly respectable occupation in spite of the example of Pushkin. Unlike Tolstoy, a real nobleman, Dostoevsky had experienced much of what he criticised in Russia in his time. His earliest published works, which date from the 1840s, already show him using the techniques which he would employ in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov: the focus on uprooted outsiders; the intense moral introspection, reflected in the rambling thoughts and long monologues of his principal characters; the jerky alternation between the fantastic and the real in minds driven by guilt to the fringe of insanity.
1848, the year of failed revolutions in Europe and an abortive one in Russia, transformed Dostoevsky’s life. He had become a peripheral member of a group of utopian socialists, the Petrashevsky circle, which met regularly to talk about politics. Like all such groups they were quickly penetrated by professional informers, and Dostoevsky was rounded up with the rest of them in 1849. He was subjected to a sadistic mock-execution, and then sent to a brutal prison camp in Omsk in Siberia. There he passed four years in unspeakable conditions with peasant convicts, mostly murderers, who loathed him, for all his socialist views, as a gentleman and an intellectual. This was followed by six years’ compulsory service in the army, initially as a private soldier.
His anger was intensified by the impossibility of expressing it, which he once likened to the feeling of being buried alive and hopelessly beating on the lid of his coffin. ‘I have not written anything here,’ he told an inspector sent to the prison camp from St Petersburg, ‘but I am gathering material which I will use later’. ‘And where is the material?’ ‘In my head.’ Much of it was poured out in the work of the following decade: The House of the Dead, one of the most extraordinary accounts in fiction of prison life, and Crime and Punishment, with its chilling anticipation of modern techniques of interrogation and psychological manipulation.
The present volume takes up the story of his life in 1871, shortly after his return from years of foreign travel. Direct experience of a world outside Russia had affected him in precisely the opposite way to other Russian writers. He returned more than ever convinced that the problems of industrialisation and political change affecting the rest of Europe had no lessons for his own country; more than ever inclined to reject his own early radicalism in favour of an uneasy combination of social criticism and intensely religious patriotism, and a strong belief in Russia’s capacity to find its own direction, even to save a godless Europe. The central place of God in his writings did not endear him to the Soviets, who published them in small editions in heavily censored form. It has also tended to diminish his impact on modern readers, at least outside Russia. In the 21st century, we like our prophets godless.
Frank’s will be the ultimate book on Dostoevsky, probably in any language, and quite possibly forever. For all that, however, it is not a joy to read. The style is workmanlike rather than flowing. His account of Dostoevsky’s thinking, far from making his mind more accessible, is almost as opaque as the original. His digressions into the novelist’s times take one a long way from his life without really illuminating the Russia in which it was lived. Perhaps Frank’s project is impossible even for a man of his encyclopaedic learning. Dostoevsky was just too extraordinary, his experience too peculiar and too personal to be a suitable vehicle.
Comments