Lectures on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lectures on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank Christina Karakepeli Lectures on Dostoevsky. By Joseph Frank. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019. xxv+248 pp. £25. ISBN 978–0–691–17896–7. In Lectures on Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank calls on the reader to make the effort 'of imagining ourselves back to the world in which [the novels] were written' (p. 75). 'Let us remember Dostoevsky's own historical position', he urges. '[T]o reach the heights by the road that Dostoevsky as author meant for us to follow', we must start 'from the ground up' (p. 138). This 'ground up' approach features throughout Frank's volume of insightful and meticulously structured essays on Dostoevskii. Through his patient and expertly researched reconstruction of Dostoevskii's biography—the result of decades-long study of the writer's life and work—Frank attempts to explain how the socio-cultural context of nineteenth-century Russia determined the evolution of Dostoevskii's beliefs and literary talents. These posthumously published lectures are based on a ten-week course that Frank gave at the Slavic Department of Stanford University while working on his magnum opus, his five-volume biography of Dostoevskii published over twenty-five years (1976–2002) by Princeton University Press. It was abridged in 2010 in a one-volume edition as Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time. Frank distilled the knowledge, observations, and insights described in the five-volume biography (in infinitely more detail) into thirteen lectures. They begin with Dostoevskii's biography and historico-cultural background before delving deep into seven of the major novels in chronological order—Poor Folk, The Double, The House of the Dead, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov—with the notable (if puzzling) exception of Demons. Frank narrates the ideological formation of Dostoevskii, the man and author, by pausing on the events that shaped his life—the early success of Poor Folk, involvement in the Petrashevskii Circle, mock execution, five years in a Siberian prison camp, and ideological struggles with the radical Nihilists. At every stage, as Frank shows, these events precipitated a consolidation (and not a complete reversal, as other critics often argue) of Dostoevskii's core beliefs: the precedence of faith over reason and the preservation—at all costs—of the individual's inner freedom. In these lectures, Frank describes how Dostoevskii's first novel Poor Folk continued and expanded on the literary tradition of Pushkin and Gogolʹ, and how Dostoevskii made his first attempts at what he himself called 'fantastic realism' in The Double. He also discusses the 'regeneration of [Dostoevskii's] convictions' (p. 45) after his imprisonment, attested by the semi-autobiographical The House of the Dead; the Underground Man's 'symbolic figure of revolt' (p. 73) in Notes from the Underground; the false promise of utilitarian humanitarianism in Crime and Punishment; the tragedy of Christ-like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot; and finally, the grand scale of The Brothers Karamazov. [End Page 518] The lectures are full of novel, authoritatively argued insights. Frank makes new connections and clears up previous misunderstandings (or what he calls 'historical errors') by attributing Dostoevskii's inspiration to the (historically) correct ideological source, a notable example being Dmitrii Pisarev's articles, cited as the inspiration for Raskolʹnikov's ideas. Frank re-evaluates hitherto less familiar works such as The Peasant Marei and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, examining how they fit within the larger scheme of Dostoevskii's ideological progress. He draws attention to sources whose significance has not previously been appreciated, such as Dostoevskii's letter to his brother Mikhail after the mock execution; the journal entry after his first wife's death; and how the image of Christ he conjured there was finally embodied in The Idiot's Prince Myshkin. Frank pre-empts one possible criticism of this book: that a sole focus on the socio-historical context can sometimes prove reductive, precluding any abstract psychological or philosophical analysis of Dostoevskii's work. Frank is well aware that 'a great work of art always transcends the conditions of its creation and has meanings that go far beyond what its own period might have thought about it' (p. 138...