Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871

Portada
Princeton University Press, 1995 - 523 páginas

This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. All the while, he worried that his recurrent epileptic attacks were impairing his literary capacities. His enforced exile intensified not only his love for his native land but also his abhorrence of the doctrines of Russian Nihilism--which he saw as an alien European importation infecting the Russian psyche. Two novels of this period were thus an attempt to conjure this looming spectre of moral-social disintegration, while The Idiot offered an image of Dostoevsky's conception of the Russian Christian ideal that he hoped would take its place.

 

Páginas seleccionadas

Índice

The Unhappiest of Mortals
9
Khlestakov in Wiesbaden
25
Our Poor Little Defenseless Boys and Girls
42
The Sources of Crime and Punishment
60
From Novella to Novel
80
A Reading of Crime and Punishment
96
A Little Diamond
151
The Gambler
170
The Idiot
316
Historical Visions
342
The Life of a Great Sinner
365
The Eternal Husband
382
Fathers Sons and Stavrogin
396
Exiles Return
413
History and Myth in The Devils I
435
History and Myth in The Devils II
453

Escape and Exile
184
Turgenev and BadenBaden
204
Geneva Life among the Exiles
223
In Search of a Novel
241
A Perfectly Beautiful Man
256
An Inconsolable Father
276
Across the Alps
294
The Book of the Impostors
472
Conclusion
499
Abbreviations
503
Notes
505
Index
517
Página de créditos

Otras ediciones - Ver todo

Términos y frases comunes

Sobre el autor (1995)

Joseph Frank is Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. For Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, Frank won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to the previous volumes of Dostoevsky, he is the author of Through the Russian Prism: Essays on Literature and Culture (Princeton).

Información bibliográfica