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Dostoevsky: A Biography His Life and Work
Book by Grossman, Leonid Petrovich
647 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1963
4 people are currently reading
100 people want to read
About the author
Leoníd Grossman
25 books19 followersLeonid Grossman was a Russian Soviet literary critic and writer. Doctor of Philology, Professor.
Born into a family of a doctor. In 1911 he graduated from the law faculty of Novorossiysk University in Odessa, where he began teaching. From 1921 he taught at the Moscow Literary and Art Institute. Bryusov; later he worked as a scientific secretary of the literary section of the State Academy of Arts, in the literary and art department of the State Publishing House, then again taught at various pedagogical institutes in Moscow. In 1948 he was among the scientists who were accused of cosmopolitanism.
For the series "The Life of Remarkable People" he wrote biographies of Pushkin and Dostoevsky.
Born into a family of a doctor. In 1911 he graduated from the law faculty of Novorossiysk University in Odessa, where he began teaching. From 1921 he taught at the Moscow Literary and Art Institute. Bryusov; later he worked as a scientific secretary of the literary section of the State Academy of Arts, in the literary and art department of the State Publishing House, then again taught at various pedagogical institutes in Moscow. In 1948 he was among the scientists who were accused of cosmopolitanism.
For the series "The Life of Remarkable People" he wrote biographies of Pushkin and Dostoevsky.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 4, 2020
S a nimerit sa tot citesc carti voluminoase si parca uneori nu mai am rabdare.
Am inceput o cu mare entuziasm, dornica sa aflu cat mai multe despre omul Dostoievski, ideile, temele sale si cum a devenit acest scriitor de geniu.
Curiozitatea mi-a fost partial satisfacuta.
Cartea este interesanta, Dostoievski a avut o viata tumultuoasa, dar scriitorul abordeaza mai degraba legaturile voite si nevoite ale autorului cu lumea politica , si mai putin viata lui particulara ( care ma intereseaza mai mult ).
Am inceput o cu mare entuziasm, dornica sa aflu cat mai multe despre omul Dostoievski, ideile, temele sale si cum a devenit acest scriitor de geniu.
Curiozitatea mi-a fost partial satisfacuta.
Cartea este interesanta, Dostoievski a avut o viata tumultuoasa, dar scriitorul abordeaza mai degraba legaturile voite si nevoite ale autorului cu lumea politica , si mai putin viata lui particulara ( care ma intereseaza mai mult ).
February 17, 2012
Every great man deserves a hagiography,but this one gives a bonus history lesson lesson. all sorts of political stuff and social from the 19th century the average American has never heard of. book is in the chicago public library.
July 19, 2023
In Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, Leonid Grossman provides an in-depth examination of the people and circumstances that influenced Dostoevsky’s writing. It is not just a biography of the famed Russian writer. It beautifully blurs the boundary between real life and art, to the point where, if you have not read Dostoevsky’s major works, you may want to postpone reading it. It contains major spoilers. Grossman links real-life people and historical events to Dostoevsky’s characters and plots, showing the crossover between the two.
Dostoevsky’s books contain immense psychological depth. His plots usually revolve around a crime or the erratic behavior of an unhinged individual. In Grossman’s biography, we learn Dostoevsky gained much of the inspiration for his profound works from reading newspapers, especially the crime sections, and from the colorful characters in his own personal life. What I most enjoyed was Grossman’s detailed analysis of the women in Dostoevsky’s life. He described them in vivid detail, and, frequently, used primary source material, such as private correspondence, to preserve their voices. In this analysis, I shall focus on the three most important women in Dostoevsky’s life and in which characters they are immortalized.
Dostoevsky’s first love was Madame Isaeva, a nervous, consumptive woman who was married to an abusive alcoholic when he met her. His love for her was complicated. On one hand, he experienced an intense pity-love for her, reminiscent of Prince Myshkin’s love for the doomed Nastasya Fillipovna in The Idiot. He wanted so desperately to save her from her miserable situation, writing, “‘She will destroy herself.’” On the other hand, he was also desperate to receive love from her. Grossman writes, “From the beginning of their intimacy Dostoevsky used to have fits of extreme jealousy, brought on by doubts as to whether she really loved him.” Grossman’s description of Dostoevsky’s involvement with this married woman leaves a lot to the imagination. He delicately hints the relationship was more than platonic, refusing to spill the gory details of the affair.
Dostoevsky proposed to Madame Isaeva almost immediately after her husband died, but by this point, he had a rival for her hand. Somehow he won out, but the rival, a schoolteacher named Nikolai Vergunov, made his ominous presence known at their wedding, and Dostoevsky was seriously afraid Madame Isaeva would get murdered at the altar. It was this incident that directly influenced the heartbreaking wedding scene in The Idiot. Almost immediately after marrying Madame Isaeva, Dostoevsky’s passions cooled, and he began seriously neglecting her. He claimed “Maria Dmitrievna was always ill, capricious and jealous…”, and that’s why the marriage was unhappy. However, she was like that before they were married, so it’s hard to understand why he complained about it afterwards. Madame Isaeva is immortalized in Katerina Ivanovna Marmeledova, the doomed, upper class consumptive woman in Crime and Punishment who lost everything when she married the drunkard, Marmeledov.
During his marriage to Madame Isaeva, Dostoevsky began an affair with a young nihilist named Apollinaria Suslova. Apollinaria was an ambitious, aspiring writer who greatly admired Dostoevsky’s works and would attend his public readings. He was her first passion, and she became totally swept up in her emotions for him, naively giving away her heart and body. This ended up wounding her deeply, as it often does to young women. She wanted an all-consuming love affair and total commitment while he, an unhappily married man, just wanted “to find escape momentarily in sensual pleasure.” One gets the sense that Apollinaria’s love affair broke her. She wrote in her diary, “I now feel and see clearly that I cannot love, that I cannot find happiness in the pleasures of love, because men’s caresses will remind me of insults and suffering.”
Once Madame Isaeva died, Dostoevsky proposed marriage to Apollinaria, but she rejected him. She wanted him to divorce his wife for her, to choose her before his wife. Apollinaria explains, “ ‘I had given myself to him in love without asking or expecting anything and he should have done the same. He did not, and I chucked him.’” It seems as though Dostoevsky never extricated Apollinaria Suslova from his heart. She was his grand passion, and her life force is embodied in the beautiful and tragic Nastasya Fillipovna of The Idiot, Lizaveta Nikolaevna of Demons, and all his other femme fatales. Once he married Anna Grigorievna, he still received and responded to Apollinaria’s letters, snapping at his wife that he would write to whomever he wanted. As time progressed, however, his love for Apollinaria evolved into a pity-love, similar to what he had for Madame Isaeva.
By the time Dostoevsky met his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, he was a broken man on the edge of financial ruin. He was a serious gambling addict who had to pawn many of his possessions to survive. In addition to his own financial problems, he inherited his brother’s debts when he died, and he was responsible for providing for Madame Isaeva’s son, Pasha, who wouldn’t make anything of himself. Additionally, he was told that, if he did not finish a book in approximately thirty days, he would lose the rights to all his works. It was for this purpose that he hired Anna Grigoryevna as a stenographer. Anna was a stable, gentle, and highly effective businesswoman. She was not emotionally unhinged, self-seeking, or ambitious like the other women. Anna helped Dostoevsky finish a 200-page book in under a month, sacrificed her entire dowry to save them from ruin, saved notes that allowed him to write The Idiot and Demons, and started publishing his books. She is like Sonya in Crime and Punishment whose humility and love helped redeem the destitute, despairing murderer, Raskolnikov. Without her, I believe Dostoevsky most likely would have self-destructed, and we would not have his masterpieces today. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. 1821-1881. Rest in Peace.
Dostoevsky’s books contain immense psychological depth. His plots usually revolve around a crime or the erratic behavior of an unhinged individual. In Grossman’s biography, we learn Dostoevsky gained much of the inspiration for his profound works from reading newspapers, especially the crime sections, and from the colorful characters in his own personal life. What I most enjoyed was Grossman’s detailed analysis of the women in Dostoevsky’s life. He described them in vivid detail, and, frequently, used primary source material, such as private correspondence, to preserve their voices. In this analysis, I shall focus on the three most important women in Dostoevsky’s life and in which characters they are immortalized.
Dostoevsky’s first love was Madame Isaeva, a nervous, consumptive woman who was married to an abusive alcoholic when he met her. His love for her was complicated. On one hand, he experienced an intense pity-love for her, reminiscent of Prince Myshkin’s love for the doomed Nastasya Fillipovna in The Idiot. He wanted so desperately to save her from her miserable situation, writing, “‘She will destroy herself.’” On the other hand, he was also desperate to receive love from her. Grossman writes, “From the beginning of their intimacy Dostoevsky used to have fits of extreme jealousy, brought on by doubts as to whether she really loved him.” Grossman’s description of Dostoevsky’s involvement with this married woman leaves a lot to the imagination. He delicately hints the relationship was more than platonic, refusing to spill the gory details of the affair.
Dostoevsky proposed to Madame Isaeva almost immediately after her husband died, but by this point, he had a rival for her hand. Somehow he won out, but the rival, a schoolteacher named Nikolai Vergunov, made his ominous presence known at their wedding, and Dostoevsky was seriously afraid Madame Isaeva would get murdered at the altar. It was this incident that directly influenced the heartbreaking wedding scene in The Idiot. Almost immediately after marrying Madame Isaeva, Dostoevsky’s passions cooled, and he began seriously neglecting her. He claimed “Maria Dmitrievna was always ill, capricious and jealous…”, and that’s why the marriage was unhappy. However, she was like that before they were married, so it’s hard to understand why he complained about it afterwards. Madame Isaeva is immortalized in Katerina Ivanovna Marmeledova, the doomed, upper class consumptive woman in Crime and Punishment who lost everything when she married the drunkard, Marmeledov.
During his marriage to Madame Isaeva, Dostoevsky began an affair with a young nihilist named Apollinaria Suslova. Apollinaria was an ambitious, aspiring writer who greatly admired Dostoevsky’s works and would attend his public readings. He was her first passion, and she became totally swept up in her emotions for him, naively giving away her heart and body. This ended up wounding her deeply, as it often does to young women. She wanted an all-consuming love affair and total commitment while he, an unhappily married man, just wanted “to find escape momentarily in sensual pleasure.” One gets the sense that Apollinaria’s love affair broke her. She wrote in her diary, “I now feel and see clearly that I cannot love, that I cannot find happiness in the pleasures of love, because men’s caresses will remind me of insults and suffering.”
Once Madame Isaeva died, Dostoevsky proposed marriage to Apollinaria, but she rejected him. She wanted him to divorce his wife for her, to choose her before his wife. Apollinaria explains, “ ‘I had given myself to him in love without asking or expecting anything and he should have done the same. He did not, and I chucked him.’” It seems as though Dostoevsky never extricated Apollinaria Suslova from his heart. She was his grand passion, and her life force is embodied in the beautiful and tragic Nastasya Fillipovna of The Idiot, Lizaveta Nikolaevna of Demons, and all his other femme fatales. Once he married Anna Grigorievna, he still received and responded to Apollinaria’s letters, snapping at his wife that he would write to whomever he wanted. As time progressed, however, his love for Apollinaria evolved into a pity-love, similar to what he had for Madame Isaeva.
By the time Dostoevsky met his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, he was a broken man on the edge of financial ruin. He was a serious gambling addict who had to pawn many of his possessions to survive. In addition to his own financial problems, he inherited his brother’s debts when he died, and he was responsible for providing for Madame Isaeva’s son, Pasha, who wouldn’t make anything of himself. Additionally, he was told that, if he did not finish a book in approximately thirty days, he would lose the rights to all his works. It was for this purpose that he hired Anna Grigoryevna as a stenographer. Anna was a stable, gentle, and highly effective businesswoman. She was not emotionally unhinged, self-seeking, or ambitious like the other women. Anna helped Dostoevsky finish a 200-page book in under a month, sacrificed her entire dowry to save them from ruin, saved notes that allowed him to write The Idiot and Demons, and started publishing his books. She is like Sonya in Crime and Punishment whose humility and love helped redeem the destitute, despairing murderer, Raskolnikov. Without her, I believe Dostoevsky most likely would have self-destructed, and we would not have his masterpieces today. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. 1821-1881. Rest in Peace.
June 12, 2007
ye kare tahghighie ghable ghabool dar bareye dostoyevski
September 26, 2014
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Less a biography and more a collection of plot summaries…thoroughly seasoned with revolutionary justifications (from Soviet perspectives)
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June 14, 2013
این کتاب توسط سیروس سهامی به فارسی برگردانده شده و در 1370 منتشر شده است
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews