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Full Description
This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. All the while, he worried that his recurrent epileptic attacks were impairing his literary capacities.
His enforced exile intensified not only his love for his native land but also his abhorrence of the doctrines of Russian Nihilism--which he saw as an alien European importation infecting the Russian psyche. Two novels of this period were thus an attempt to conjure this looming spectre of moral-social disintegration, while The Idiot offered an image of Dostoevsky's conception of the Russian Christian ideal that he hoped would take its place.
Contents
List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Transliteration and Texts xv PART I: SOME "STRANGE, 'UNFINISHED' IDEAS" Chapter 1: Introduction 3 Chapter 2: "The Unhappiest of Mortals" 9 Chapter 3: Khlestakov in Wiesbaden 25 Chapter 4: "Our Poor Little Defenseless Boys and Girls" 42 Chapter 5: The Sources of Crime and Punishment 60 Chapter 6: From Novella to Novel 80 Chapter 7: A Reading of Crime and Punishment 96 PART II: REMARRIAGE Chapter 8: "A Little Diamond" 151 Chapter 9: The Gambler 170 Chapter 10: Escape and Exile 184 Chapter 11: Turgenev and Baden-Baden 204 Chapter 12: Geneva: Life among the Exiles 223 PART III: A RUSSIAN IDEAL Chapter 13: In Search of a Novel 241 Chapter 14: "A Perfectly Beautiful Man" 256 Chapter 15: An Inconsolable Father 276 Chapter 16: Across the Alps 294 Chapter 17: The Idiot 316 Chapter 18: Historical Visions 342 PART IV: THE PAMPHLET AND THE POEM Chapter 19: The Life of a Great Sinner 365 Chapter 20: The Eternal Husband 382 Chapter 21: Fathers, Sons, and Stavrogin 396 Chapter 22: Exile's Return 413 Chapter 23: History and Myth in The Devils: I 435 Chapter 24: History and Myth in The Devils: ii 453 Chapter 25: The Book of the Impostors 472 Chapter 26: Conclusion 499 Abbreviations 503 Notes 505 Index 517
