Volume 31, Number 1 · February 2, 1984
Dostoevsky and His Double
By V.S. Pritchett
Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859
by Joseph Frank
Princeton University Press, 320 pp., $25.00
The second volume of Joseph Frank's very searching biography of Dostoevsky has now appeared. Two more will follow. Its overwhelming merit is that it does not stop at the personal life and character of an extraordinary man but concentrates on the novelist reacting to the literary and the fluctuating influences of Russian political and social history in his time. For all the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century Russia itself was a haunting figure in the novelists' imbroglio. Russia melts into the man and we can partly separate them, yet much cannot be separated.
Review, 2466 words
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