Volume 50, Number 5 · March 27, 2003
The Two Dostoevskys
By Aileen Kelly
Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881
by Joseph Frank
Princeton University Press, 784 pp., $35.00
Albert Camus once declared that the author of The Possessed and not Karl Marx was the greatest prophet for the twentieth century. Dostoevsky's depiction of the monstrous consequences of ideological fanaticism is equally pertinent to the twenty-first. Yet this great champion of liberty against the tyranny of ideas was himself the proponent of a 'Russian idea': a form of messianic nationalism, coupled in his last years with a virulent anti-Semitism.
Review, 4093 words
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