Direct experience of a world outside Russia had affected him in precisely the opposite way to other Russian writers. The present volume takes up the story of his life in 1871, shortly after his return from years of foreign travel. ‘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. ‘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’. 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. 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. Unlike Tolstoy, a real nobleman, Dostoevsky had experienced much of what he criticised in Russia in his time. He himself set out to be a professional writer, still not a wholly respectable occupation in spite of the example of Pushkin. His father was an army doctor and his grandfather a provincial clergyman. 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.ĭostoevsky was born in 1821 into a family that was legally classified as noble but would not have ranked as such by any other standard. This would be a marvellous achievement if it could be done. 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. ‘Monumental’ is the standard clichZ for such an enterprise, and Frank’s is certainly that. 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.

Joseph frank's dostoevsky