From Publishers Weekly
This fourth installment in Frank's acclaimed, projected five-volume biography presents an astonishingly vivid, uncanny portrait of Dostoevsky's spiritual, emotional and artistic development during his crucial years abroad. Marrying his pert, reserved stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (his first wife died in 1864), Dostoevsky fled Russia with her in 1867 to escape harassing creditors and grasping dependents. Their obscure, lonely existence in Germany, Switzerland and Italy, until their return to Russia in 1871, was punctuated by the tragic death of their first child, Sofya, who lived only two months; by the penurious writer's frequent, disabling epileptic fits; by his mania for gambling; and by a stormy meeting with liberal, pro-Western Turgenev in Baden-Baden. The miracle implied by the book's title is that during this period, Dostoevsky wrote three major novels-Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Devils-plus two novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. Frank anchors the prophetic writer in his social and cultural milieu, tracing his struggles against Russian nihilists, his expose of the pitfalls of revolutionary politics, his messianic nationalism and his vision of an authentic Russian culture rooted in Christian morality and mystical union with the soil. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
These two works add immensely to our understanding of Dostoevsky, though they have quite different purposes: Frank completes his monumental biography of Dostoevsky, while Scanlan examines the Russian writer's philosophical thought. Scanlan (emeritus, philosophy, Ohio State Univ.) argues that while much has been said about Dostoevsky as a writer, he has rarely been treated as a philosopher. Yet through his writings, he explored a variety of philosophical issues, primarily concerning the nature of humankind. Scanlan studies Dostoevsky's nationalism, opposition to rational egotism, and beliefs about our eternal souls, moral agency, and aesthetic needs. Of course, Dostoevsky's philosophy was framed within a Christian worldview, and Scanlan does excellent work discussing Dostoevsky's ideas in terms of his religious faith. Readers wanting to learn more about the thought of one of Russia's great writers will find this work essential. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Lesley Chamberlain, The [London] Times
[Dostoevsky] is the genius who has done the most to illumine nineteenthcentury Russian psychology and to make the terrifying problems of atheism and nihilism part of the modernism we still grapple with. Frank's magisterial fivevolume study of his life and work ... salutes the grandeur of Dostoevsky's project.


J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other Frank has succeeded triumphantly.


Stephen Jan Parker, The New York Times Book Review
[Frank's] high contribution is to chronicle the life and elaborate the socialpoliticalcultural matrix in which to consider the writings, and to do this more thoroughly and comprehensively than has been previously done.


Irwin Weil, The Washington Post Book World
For a reader ready to grapple with the most powerful ideas and feelings in Dostoevsky's extraordinary life and work, this book is a godsend.


From Booklist
Like the life it chronicles, Frank's magisterial biography of Dostoevsky concludes in the radiance of rare achievement. In this fifth and final volume, Frank surpasses even the brilliance of the earlier volumes in probing the literary genius that rose to an unexpected zenith in his Brothers Karamazov. Both in illuminating the historical context for this masterpiece and in celebrating its imaginative artistry, Frank amplifies Dostoevsky's singular contribution to world literature. No one understands better than Frank the torturous process through which Dostoevsky converted his personal observations into deathless characters--the impulsive sensualist, Dimitri; the cynical rationalist, Ivan; the self-sacrificing idealist, Alyosha. Frank likewise surpasses other commentators in capturing the defining moment in Russian culture when Dostoevsky triumphed over Turgenev with his famous Pushkin speech. But Frank also confronts the failures of Dostoevsky's final years: the legal missteps in editing The Citizen; the wooden plotting of A Raw Youth; the chauvinistic polemics of the Diary of a Writer. And in narrating the author's personal life, Frank opens to the reader Dostoevsky's moments of deepest vulnerability: his rage against his wife, Anna, when a prank went awry; his grief when his three-year-old son unexpectedly died; his anguish when his rival, Tolstoy, apostatized from Christianity. The complexities in Frank's nuanced portrait well reflect a central motif of Dostoevsky's own fiction: the irreducible mystery of the human soul. A landmark biography, certain to win praise from scholars and Dostoevsky readers everywhere. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

". . . a narrative of such compelling precision, thoroughness and insight as to give the reader a sense not just of acquaintanceship, but of complete identification with Dostoevsky, of looking through his eyes and understanding with his mind."--Helen Muchnic, Boston Globe"This is unquestionably the best account we have of Dostoevsky in his time."--Donald Fanger, The New Republic". . . will rightly be considered one of the finest achievements of American literary scholarship."--Ren Wellek, Washington Post

FROM THE CRITICS

Donald Fanger - The Boston Globe

The first and last thing to say about Joseph Frank's ongoing enterprise... is that it is unrivaled in both its ambition and achievement. This is simply the most reliable, detailed, balanced and up to date account we have of the most influential novelist of the last 150 years. It is also the most fascinating... the present volume tells the story of transformation. There is hardly a more dramatic one to be found anywhere.

Robin Feuer Miller - Philadelphia Inquirer

Just as Frank's magnificent third volume... unravels an immensefully important and complex period in Dostoevksy's life and, along the way, evokes and explicates the Russia of the mid nineteenth century... Frank's effort as a biographer of Dostoevsky has been a unique and successful experiment in the bipographical form.

Helen Muchnic - Boston Globe