Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal 1850-1859
Frank, Joseph
I n this, the second in a projected fivevolume biography of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, deals with one of the most important experiences...
...And so, we are offered a portrait of Dostoevsky as a writer, not simply as an individual...
...I remember," he wrote years later, "when I got off the plank bed and gazed around [the prison barracks], that I suddenly felt I could look on these unfortunates with quite different eyes, and suddenly, as i f by a miracle, all hatred and rancor vanished from my heart...
...The then quite young novelist, who had made his name almost overnight with his first novel, Poor Folk, was sent to the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress and placed in solitary confinement...
...philanthropic and humanitarian ideas that had received wide circulation in the Russia of the 1840s...
...These four years are central to an understanding of Dostoevsky's work and philosophy because it was during this period of hard labor that he experienced his religious conversion and broke with the "idealism" of his youth...
...As Frank writes, "Life in the barracks was a never-ending, rasping assault on Dostoevsky's sensibility," and it left him deeply troubled...
...Petersburg...
...His first conception of "the people" had come from the Robert Leiter has written for the New Republic, Commonweal, the American Scholar, and other journals...
...and this quality seems attributable to Frank's biographical approach...
...Frightened, the young Dostoevsky ran towards a peasant, known only as "Marey," who was plowing a field...
...In such works the peasantry was made to seem the embodiment of morality and goodness...
...In his introduction, he writes that his method has been to subordinate Dostoevsky's private life "to a depiction of his interconnection with the literary and social-cultural history of his time...
...Consider the pain and expense...
...Frank's first volume, The Seeds o f Revolt, which won both the James Russell Lowell and Christian Gauss Awards in 1977, describes Dostoevsky's childhood and youth...
...still, the Czar decided that these particular "radicals" had to be used as examples for other would-be revolutionaries...
...clarify the mysterious mutation...
...and his eventual involvement with the radical inteUigentsia of St...
...When he was nine years old he had been wandering through the forest on his father's estate and thought he heard someone shout that a wolf was near...
...Yet there was an incident, related by Dostoevsky years later in his Diary o f a Writer, that changed his despair over the peasantry into positive, religious fervor...
...In Frank's opinion, Dostoevsky's conversion was genuine...
...The Years of Ordeal takes up the story at the point of Dostoevsky's arrest by the Czarist police...
...A mock execution was staged...
...While watching his fellow prisoners prepare for the Easter festivities, Dostoevsky recalled an incident from his childhood...
...I n this, the second in a projected fivevolume biography of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton, deals with one of the most important experiences in the great Russian novelist's life: the time he spent imprisoned in Siberia for his involvement with the radicals of the Petrashevsky circle...
...A government investigation of Petrashevsky and his followers (who had met primarily to discuss the abolishment of serfdom) found little that was subversive about the group's activities...
...She lifted the child and assured him that no wolf was near...
...But from the start of his prison sentence Dostoevsky saw only examples of the cruelty and brutishness of the poor...
...And this can only be done if the life is constantly viewed through the focus of, and in terms of, the work, rather than the more usual way of regarding the work only as a more or less incidental by-product of the life...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 43...
...the murder of his father at the hands of his serfs...
...The Years o f Ordeal is of a quality equal to that of The Seeds o f Revolt...
...The Czar issued his "pardon" at the last moment and the prisoners were sent to Siberia...
...however, it cannot be said "to involve religious faith in the strict sense, although it unquestionably turned on beliefs with strong religious associations...
...Yet Dostoevsky had not placed his faith in God or Christ per se but rather "in the Russian common people as, in some sense, the human image of Christ...
...and, according to Frank, in order " t o grasp, so far as possible, the creative process by which life is transformed into art, the experience of the life must be apprehended and organized, without any violation of the historical records, so as to BEFORE YOU TATTOO...
...In an age when biographies thrive on gossip and excess, such restraint should be vigorously applauded...
...Frank's method is truly unique...
...Dostoevsky remembered "Marey smiling at him gently 'like a mother,' blessing him with the sign of the cross and crossing himself . . . . The encounter was isolated, in an empty field, and only God, perhaps, saw from above what deep and enlightened human feeli n g . . , could fill the heart of a coarse, bestially ignorant Russian peasant serf . . . . " From that moment on Dostoevsky's attitude toward his fellow convicts changed...
...You needn't have it fl, tattooed on your ~ I chest--wearing one of our Tee shirts gets the message across just fine...
...Dostoevsky's training as a cadet at the Academy of Engineers...
...It was there in the prison camp Dostoevsky called "the house of the dead" that he had his "encounter with the Russian people" and was forever transformed...
...and throughout it all Dostoevsky was certain he would die...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
