Dostoevsky: the essential Russian

The complexity of Dostoevsky's world view emerges in an important new biography, writes Geordie Williamson

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
By Joseph Frank
Princeton University Press, 959pp, $65
THOUGH it may stretch credulity to say so, the 959 pages of text in Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky represent a remarkable act of concision.

This is partly because the biography of the great, and greatly misunderstood, 19th-century Russian writer was originally published in five volumes, an undertaking that began in 1976 and concluded in 2002. Any condensation of this project would look svelte by comparison.

But it is also a tribute to Russian scholar Mary Petrusewicz's editorial economies. For it was she who, in a two-year period, cut nearly two-thirds of Frank's original material, summarising, reorganising and rewriting passages as she went to maintain narrative coherence. The result may be relatively stripped down but is far from a hurried cut-and-paste; like the single-volume abridgment from 1985 of Leon Edel's life of Henry James, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time at last offers non-specialist readers access to the definitive biography of an important figure in the history of the novel.

And what a life! One of the things Frank's research makes clear is that the most improbable plots of Dostoevsky's fiction were often exceeded by biographical fact. Dostoevsky's father was murdered by serfs on the family's hardscrabble, debt-ridden estate when the author was still a student. Not long afterwards, Dostoevsky himself was found guilty of plotting against the tsar, his death sentenced commuted to Siberian exile only moments before he was to be shot.

Returning from years of convict misery, Dostoevsky regained his former literary reputation by talent and force of will; then, while gambling almost everything away in the casinos of western Europe, he exonerated himself with four late masterpieces produced in a burst of novelistic energy.

Yet the drama and manic imbalance with which the author reworks that life experience into his fiction is distracting: scholars, critics and other biographers have tended to concentrate on Dostoevsky's literary constructions - his posturing fools, burning idealists, masters of contradiction - and excluded the toiling artist behind them. Dostoevsky's works cannot be separated from the man and his world without damage. V. S. Pritchett wrote that for all Russian novelists of the 19th century, Russia itself was a haunting figure. Frank shows us that Dostoevsky was not just haunted by Russia; he was possessed by it.

The signal virtue of Frank's biographical approach is that it places the novelist back inside a historical and socio-political frame. Once returned to his native context - and the work re-examined in the light of once-contemporary debates about philosophy, art, politics and religion - many aspects of Dostoevsky's life and art become explicable. Far from burying the writer in detail, Frank's immense knowledge of 19th-century Russia (he is professor emeritus of Slavic literature at Stanford and Princeton) helps synchronise Dostoevsky with his times.

Patient, cautious, critical but not judgmental, using clear language and a chronologically ordered narrative structure, Frank neutralises the unreliable and hysterical self-constructions of which his subject was capable. The result is like watching an artist building an intricate, large-scale painting around a single figure.

Frank allows us to see Dostoevsky not just as an abstracted instance of creative achievement or a swarm of floating signs and symbols but as an individual who was enmeshed in those structures of thought and feeling from which his society, for better or worse, was built.

Most significantly, the first of these newly won clarities concerns religion. Unlike his aristocratic contemporaries Tolstoy and Turgenev, who observed the letter of Russia's Orthodox Christianity for the sake of their servants and were reared largely without religious belief, Dostoevsky came from a more modest, and therefore pious, social stratum.

Frank shows us that, although Dostoevsky's doctor father managed to grab hold of the bottom rung of the nobility and grant his sons a Western-style education, the family's home life was imbued with a religiosity at odds with Dostoevsky's grander peers. Looking back, Dostoevsky wrote, "In our family, we knew the Gospel almost from the cradle." And his biographer concurs:

The very first impressions that awakened the consciousness of the child were those embodying the teachings of the Christian faith, and the world thereafter for Dostoevsky would always remain transfigured by the glow of this supernatural illumination.

Frank traces a line from Dostoevsky's devout early years, through his youthful flirtation with utopian socialism imported from the West - intellectual experiments for which he paid dearly during his Siberian exile and that provoked a conversion back to a fierce orthodoxy in religion - and on to his mature, idiosyncratic, existential faith, and finds it an unbroken one:

Dostoevsky was to say later that the problem of the existence of God had tormented him all his life; but this only confirms that it was always emotionally impossible for him to accept a world that had no relation to a God of any kind.

What was true of religion was also true of the wider Russian culture. Other writers of the era read in French and German; the language and literature of their countrymen was discovered later in life, a nationalist gloss on what was a Western European education. The well-born Aleksandr Herzen, a man regarded as the father of Russian socialism, fails to mention a single Russian book from childhood in his autobiography.

But as his biographer painstakingly recreates Dostoevsky's early reading in Russian history, poetry and fiction, and finds it to be "a period of intense literary and intellectual assimilation into his native tradition", we note another marked difference. Dostoevsky was taught from the outset to identify himself emotionally with Russia and its past. When Frank peeks over the teenage Dostoevsky's shoulder as he weeps at news of his hero Pushkin's death, he glimpses the pronounced slavophilia of The Brothers Karamazov in embryo.

If we are to understand him properly, we should keep in mind this precocious capacity to pour the full intensity of his private emotions into what was, essentially, a matter of cultural and national concern.

Just as Vladimir Nabokov once read all of Don Quixote to tally just how many battles the man from La Mancha had won or lost, Frank takes great pains to attend to Dostoevsky's oeuvre as a close reader rather than a theoretician: a decidedly old-fashioned take that allows him to show readers what it was that Dostoevsky hoped to communicate with his novels.

The other refreshing thing about the considerable space that Frank allots to discussion of Dostoevsky's fiction is that it marks the biographer as one who remembers his role. "It is the production of such masterpieces that makes Dostoevsky's life worth recounting at all" is a line that David Foster Wallace, a great admirer, quotes from a review of the longer work; and it is a sentence that Petrusewicz kept uppermost in her mind while making editorial decisions.

So it is that while some shorter, lesser and earlier works are given briefer summaries, or treated in portmanteau critical passages, Frank's explication of the important novels remains largely intact. After showing the debt Dostoevsky owed to figures such as Balzac and George Sand, Gogol and Pushkin in his early work, the biographer performs a masterful contextualising procedure on Dostoevsky's documentary novel The House of the Dead, revealing how Dostoevsky's work was shaped by the appearance of loosely theme-structured narratives such as Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album and the stories of Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches, and how its publication was aided by a loosening of censorship in the early 1860s.

Frank tracks down every model, real or fictional, on which the Russian writer's work is based, and embeds each narrative in the circumstances, personal and political, of its production; he is indefatigable in his efforts to (in Wallace's words) "trace and explain the novels' genesis out of Dostoevsky's own ideological engagement with Russian history and culture."

Yet Frank's research never negates what he regards as his subject's unique genius; indeed, in a paradox worthy of Dostoevsky himself, Frank's biography shows that it is only by establishing contexts and commonalities that Dostoevsky's singular achievement may be properly discerned.

Take Notes from Underground, the short novel, written during his first wife's final illness, that represents his first, proper post-exile work. Frank seeks to rescue this novel, whose protagonist, the underground man of the title, has become "part of the vocabulary of common culture", from some of its more zealous modern interpreters. More than a hazy proto-existentialist text, he argues, Notes from Underground is an intricate and cunning attack on Nikolay Chernyshevsky, whose socialist utopianism Dostoevsky had come to abhor, using a fictional figure who parodies this philosophy in word and deed. Re-read Notes in the light of Frank's chapter and you will fall off your chair laughing.

Reading all of Frank's Dostoevsky is like climbing a mountain; after the hard slog, there is a spectacular view from the summit. The very best bits come towards the end, when, with Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky pulls off the most remarkable literary quadrille in literature. "In the works written between 1864 and 1880," writes J. M. Coetzee, reviewing Frank's fourth volume, "Dostoevsky conducts a searching interrogation of [Enlightenment] Reason ... as the basis for a good society."

This interrogation is carried out at white heat not just because that is Dostoevsky's manner but because the books are written by someone at the very centre of an historical crisis.

And here is the nub of things. Dostoevsky's greatest artistic achievements are also philosophical critiques. They are inextricably bound up with arguments between ideological forces that shaped life for millions of people during the century that followed. Frank's great insight is that, just as no one aspect of Dostoevsky's complex personality can be separated from the others, no part of his writing - whether aesthetic, moral, religious or political - can be quarantined from the others. Frank's biography honours the polyphony of Dostoevsky's novelistic imagination: even in truncated form, it is a rare triumph.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.