Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time is a biography of the nineteenth-century Russian master novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose most famous works include Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Originally published in five volumes by American literary scholar Joseph Frank—but condensed into one volume for this 2009 edition—the book is widely considered to be the best biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky ever written. In addition to outlining the various major events of Dostoevsky's life, Frank also examines the historical and cultural context in which the author formulated his ideas and published his most enduring works.

The first part covers Dostoevsky's life from his birth in 1821 to 1849, the year he was arrested and sentenced to four years in a Siberian prison for discussing books that had been banned by the Tsarist regime. Frank discusses the political environment in which Dostoevsky was born. The Emperor of Russia at that time, Tsar Alexander I, had ruled for a couple of decades and had had a number of successes. However, while he had always been suspicious of revolutionary factions, Alexander's paranoia and agitation had reached a fever pitch by 1821. He purged schools of teachers he suspected of foreign influence and began to govern in a highly reactionary manner. While Dostoevsky was only four when Alexander died of typhus and his successor Nicholas I took over, the author argues that the political repression sparked by Alexander toward the end of his life would have a profound impact on Dostoevsky's later ideas.

Frank also places great emphasis on the fact that Dostoevsky, unlike virtually all of the Russian masters of his era (Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy), was not born into a land-owning family and thus did not belong to Russia's gentry or aristocracy. In addition to fostering empathy for the lower classes, Dostoevsky's lack of a traditional aristocratic education had perhaps the most dramatic impact in terms of the author's religious views. Unlike most of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, whose upbringing placed little emphasis on religion, the Russian Orthodox church was hugely important to Dostoevsky growing up and would continue to be for many years. According to one of Dostoevsky's contemporaries, Alexander Herzen, “Nowhere does religion play so modest a role in education as in Russia.” Frank points out that Herzen is referring to aristocratic education. Therefore, Dostoevsky's relative piety in comparison to his literary peers was largely a result of his socio-economic status.



In 1837, when Dostoevsky was sixteen, his parents forced him to abandon his academic pursuits to join the Nikolayev Military Education Institute. One of his friends described him as lacking a military bearing. In time, no longer able to resist the call of a literary career, Dostoevsky abandoned his military exploits to write full-time. Unfortunately, he struggled financially to support himself with his writing. Around this time, he began associating with a fairly moderate socialist group that argued for the abolition of serfdom and an end to censorship under the Tsar. Despite the fact that the group was described by more radical revolutionary groups as "innocent and harmless," Dostoevsky's membership in the group caused him to run afoul of the Tsarist regime. In 1849, he was sentenced to a Siberian labor camp for reading and distributing banned books. There, he was forced to do backbreaking work in freezing cold weather for the next four years. Frank discusses Dostoevsky’s time in the prison camp in the second part of the book.

In part 3, Frank focuses on the period between 1860 and 1865. While Dostoevsky still struggled to support himself financially as much of his writing failed to sell, he was thrilled simply to be back in the center of cultural conversations in Russia, as opposed to relegated to the military or a labor camp. During this period, Dostoevsky began to explore the idea of nihilism, which later would influence the major philosophical movement Existentialism. It was during this period that Dostoevsky wrote Notes From Underground, which is considered by many to be the first-ever text of Existentialism, even though the movement didn't yet have a name.

Between 1865 and his death in 1881, Dostoevsky wrote his most famous and remembered works, including Crime and Punishment (1865), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), his final novel which many literary scholars consider to be his masterpiece.



In January of 1881, Dostoevsky suffered a series of pulmonary hemorrhages, which would result in his death. On his deathbed, he asked that the parable of the Prodigal Son be read to him. In closing, Frank guesses at the significance of his choice of parable: "It was this parable of transgression, repentance, and forgiveness that he wished to leave as a last heritage to his children, and it may well be seen as his own ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life and the message of his work."