Details

Subject(s)

• Novelists, Russian [Browse]
• Novelists, Russian—19th century—Biography [Browse]
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 1821-1881 [Browse]

Related name

• American Council of Learned Societies [Browse]

Series

ACLS Humanities E-Book. [More in this series]

Summary note

The term "biography" seems insufficiently capacious to describe the singular achievement of Joseph Frank's five-volume study of the life of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. One critic, writing upon the publication of the final volume, casually tagged the series as the ultimate work on Dostoevsky "in any language, and quite possibly forever." Frank himself had not originally intended to undertake such a massive work. The endeavor began in the early 1960's as an exploration of Dostoevsky's fiction, but it later became apparent to Frank that a deeper appreciation of the fiction would require a more ambitious engagement with the writer's life, directly caught up as Dostoevsky was with the cultural and political movements of mid- and late-nineteenth-century Russia. Already in his forties, Frank undertook to learn Russian and embarked on what would become a five-volume work comprising more than 2,500 pages. The result is an intellectual history of nineteenth-century Russia, with Dostoevsky's mind as a refracting prism. The volumes have won numerous prizes, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of description

Description based on print version record.

Language note

In English.

Contents

• Front matter
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• TRANSLITERATION
• PART I. Moscow
• PART II. St. Petersburg
• PART III. In The Limelight
• PART IV. The Road to Self-Discovery
• Notes
• Appendix: Freud's Case-History of Dostoevsky
• Index

Show 9 more Contents items

ISBN

• 0-691-06260-9
• 1-4008-4444-4

OCLC

• 1203732341
• 1153464057

Doi

• 10.1515/9781400844449

Statement on language in description

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