Dostoevsky: a writer in his time

[Betty]

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank

The subtitle "a writer in his time" points to what the reader is looking for in this biography of Fyodor Dostoyevsky its applicability to the writer himself and to the writings while keeping in mind the inconsistent nature of life in general as well as the contradictory influences affecting him particularly in early life in nineteenth-century Russia. In Part I, Chapter 2, The Family, the boy is mostly influenced at home by each parent.

[Carol]

Sorry Asma, I'm waiting for the book to be transferred to my library. I requested it a couple weeks ago, but they say that it will be here by this Saturday.

[Betty]

No need to worry, Carol. There's a lot to go in the biography--through all D's major works and all the influences upon him. How D comes to grips with the "enigma of man" will be a major theme

"...the enigma of human life--the enigma of the sudden irruption of irrational, uncontrollable, and destructive forces both within the world and in the human psyche; the enigma of the incalculable moral consequences...It was this enigma that, indeed, he was to spend the rest of his life trying to solve; and no one can accuse him, while doing so, of having wasted his time."

I just finished chapters 3 & 4, which demonstrate D's personality, ideals, and friendships as well as his connection with his father Dr. D, and his experiences in the military engineering school at the Peterhof palace.

[Carol]

I look forward to reading it.

[Betty]

In chapters 5 & 6, around the time he graduates from the engineering academy in 1830-40s, Dostoevsky is greatly influenced by the French realist Honoré de Balzac (Père Goriot). Soon after, his then countryman Nikolai Gogol (The Overcoat, Dead Souls) also becomes important to his development as a writer.

[Betty]

In chapters 7 & 8, set in the 1840s at the start of Dostoevsky's literary endeavors, his novel Poor Folk changed the standard point of view in epistolary novels. In later works, the characters he painted revealed the emotional extremes and intention/behavior gulf of his own psychological disposition.

[Betty]

The Double as well as White Nights , early stories among his best, and pointing toward his major works, leading up to one of his themes, salvation--sacrificing pure egotism as the hurtful response to others and oneself because of past negative environments by releasing authentic feelings of love.

[Betty]

Chapters 11 & 12 explain the social-philosophical influences (e.g. the possibility for moral responsibility among oppressed serfs). With other intellectuals, he was debating different ways to organize society--which socialist ideas were good but impractical, which liberal changes in 1848 were happening in other European nations, which style (Russian or Western) was right for Russia. The author Frank engagingly explains different nineteenth-century philosophies entertained by the critic Belinsky, by Dostoevsky, by Petrashevsky, and other Russian thinkers or revolutionaries. Rather than irreligious. Dostoevsky himself was outspoken about the inhumanity of serfdom. Nevertheless, he wound up in Siberia.

[Betty]

Chapter 13.
Dostoevsky participates in the Petrashevsky circle, a quasi-secret, group to brainstorm nineteenth-century solutions to serfdom, censorship, and other societal conditions contrary to Christian ideals of fairness and equality. The next phase of his life is about to begin with his arrest.

[Betty]

Chapter 14.
Dostoevsky and his intellectual associates who gather at secret meetings to talk about everything under the sun and about current society find themselves in the Peter and Paul fortress in confinement until they go to a Siberian labor camp. Dostoevsky actually favors the autocracy of the tsar (in 1849 Nicholas I) because serfdom could be abolished by the tsar's authority. And, he is not an atheist but a Christian with beliefs in life after death, mutual forgiveness, and love.

[Betty]

Chapter 15.
Wikipedia article about Dostoevsky's four years in a Omsk, Siberia, penal colony gives the same major points as in Frank's biography. His experiences with conditions, people, and peasant dialect during the exile frame The House of the Dead . The plot details and historical characters of this 1861 novel, per Wikipedia, is exceedingly similar to Dostoevsky's life in exile.