Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 (DOSTOEVSKY (FRANK, JOSEPH))

By Joseph Frank and Joseph A. Koch

Book Overview

Volume two of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the Russian novelist in any language and one of the greatest literary biographies ever written. In this monumental work, Frank blends biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism to illuminate Dostoevsky's works and set them in their personal, historical, and ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

This volume opens with the detention of the bookish young writer for membership in the radical Petrashevsky Circle and closes with his return to the capital ten years later as an ex-convict and former soldier who now proclaims himself an ardent supporter of the czar and the Russian imperial dynasty.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691065764
• ISBN13: 9780691065762
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

More exciting than Crime and Punishment

Frank has written a magisterial series on Dostoevsky, a life's work. The books move through the social, political, biographical and literary world of Dostoevsky. This reader was thrilled.