Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 by Joseph Frank (review)

Abstract

1164 Reviews that he said his last farewell to Jenny Lind, an episode retold in Mit Livs Eventyr, his autobiography. His farewell to Austria came in 1872. It brought his long experience of the German-speaking world to a muted, ironic, yettouching close which will put many a reader of Rossel's informative and well-illustrated study in mind of Thomas Mann. University of Bristol Peter Skrine Dostoevsky: The Mantle ofthe Prophet, i8ji-i88i. By Joseph Frank. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2002. xv + 784 pp. ?32.50 (pbk ?12.95). ISBN 0-691-08665-6 (pbk 0-691-11569-9). This, the fifthand final volume in Joseph Frank's definitive literary biography of Dostoevskii, begins with Dostoevskii's return to St Petersburg from abroad in July 1871, after a four-year absence, just as his third novel, The Devils, was being pub? lished. Frank deals here with Dostoevskii's fifteen-montheditorship, in 1873-74, of the magazine Grazhdanin (The Citizen), owned by the powerful and rather louche Prince Meshcherskii. He describes the history of the composition of A Raw Youth and then discusses that novel, whose relative weakness he partly attributes to the li? mitations that Dostoevskii imposed upon himself by his agreement to publish it in the journal Notes of the Father land (which by 1875, when the novel appeared, had taken on a Populist hue). Frank justifiably pays much attention to the Diary ofa Writer,the monthly newspaper that Dostoevskii produced single-handed in 1876-77, and again in 1880, and in which Dostoevskii published two of his finest short works of fiction, 'A Gentle Creature' and 'The Diary of a Ridiculous Man', as well as much searching comment on current social and political issues. Frank also devotes much space to the festivities surrounding the unveiling ofthe statue to Pushkin in Moscow in 1880 and to Dostoevskii's momentous speech on that occasion and the attendant polemics. There is material on Dostoevskii's relations with other writers during the last fewyears ofhis life, and in particular his literary enmity with Turgenev and his sense of competition with Tolstoi, whom he never met. Many of the foregoing matters also relate in some way to the composition of Dostoevskii's crowning achievement, The Brothers Karamazov , which was completed in 1880, and which Frank examines at great length before providing a moving finale on Dostoevskii's death and funeral in late January 1881. As in previous volumes in his series, Frank establishes a dense background against which to read Dostoevskii's writings. Here he is at pains to show that the 'nihilism' that had characterized radical thought in the 1860s, and against which Dostoevskii's creative energies had been pitted in that decade, gave way in the 1870s to Populism. The thinkers who promoted the latter doctrine, such as Lavrov and Mikhailovskii, were much more congenial to Dostoevskii than the nihilists had been, on account of their admiration of the Russian people, their assertion of freedom of choice and per? sonal moral responsibility over crude determinism, and the spirit of selfless service and self-sacrifice that they encouraged. On the other hand, Dostoevskii was dismayed by the rise of terrorism towards the end of the decade, following the failure of the 'going to the people' in 1874 and the authorities' harsh treatment of the peaceful propagandists. This development threatened the stability of the autocratic regime, which Dostoevskii considered so fundamental to Russian identity. It was in the con? text of political assassinations and attempts at assassination in the last three years of Dostoevskii's life?a development to which educated society responded with an ominous passivity?that The Brothers Karamazov was written. Dostoevskii reprises many of his major ideas and themes in the period that Frank surveys in this volume, and some of them now findtheir fullest expression. He deve? lops his belief that a world without God has no meaning. It is a psychological necessity, MLRy 100.4,2005 1165 he reaffirms,for the human personality to experience itself as free. The spiritual and the carnal, the sacred and the profane, are again juxtaposed. The struggle between reason and faith goes on. Socialism and Christianity, in its pure...