Dostoevsky and the Sowing of Seeds

...Both novelists have an extremely firm grasp on their diverse characters and situations, even while these maintain lives of their own against the controlling themes of the sagas...

...and the following year the doctor, who had gone to pieces after his wife's death, was murdered by JEFFREY MEYFJI8 the peasants of his country estate...

...During that year he joined a radical group which planned to distribute inflammatory propaganda, spark a revolution in Russia and achieve his passionate ambition to free the serfs...

...The news of Dostoevsky's lack of promotion in in 1838 (due t~3 slackness in drill) brought on his father's apoplectic stroke...

...Petersburg which (like the Austrian military school later attended by Rilke and Musil) was dominated by harsh discipline and violent sadism, and which he described as one long torture...

...Though Freud's famous essay, "Dostoevsky and Parricide," connects the violent death of the father with the onset of epileptic symptoms in the son, Frank proves there is no evidence for this assertion and that the epilepsy actually began in Siberia...

...But this rather naive and incautious group was infiltrated by a police spy who attended their meetings and made thorough reports to the authorities...

...Since the murder was almost impossible to prove, and a conviction would have led to the exile of all the male serfs and the destruction of the children's patrimony, the case was dropped...

...BOOKS DOSTOEVSKY AND THE SOWING OF SEEDS Dostoevsky JOSEPH FRANK Princeton U. Press, $16.50 This handsome volume, the first of four, deals with Dostoevsky's life from 1821 to 1849, when the seeds of revolt were sown, and ends with his arrest for revolutionary activities which later led to a mock execution, a lastminute "reprieve" and four years of bitter exile in Siberia...

...Powell's characters tread, as Jenkins writes, "the formal dance with which human life is concerned...

...and he was secretive, evasive and the victim of a tormenting nervous illness as an adult...

...The following year Dostoevsky,' at his father's insistence but against his own wishes, entered the Academy of Military Engineers in St...

...and he would have instants of sublime inner harmony in the ecstatic 'aura' preceding an epileptic attack...

...But it created profound guilt in Dostoevsky...

...Cloth $12.95, Paper $6.95 THE MEANING OF MISSION by Jose Comblin The author of Jesus of Nazareth (Orbis 1976) combines an easily readable style with fresh insights into the now controverted question of mission...

...Dostoevsky's other significant works of the rate 1840s were The Double, a portrayal of consciousness obsessed by guilt and foundering in madness whose characters, however pathological, express his social and cultural criticism...

...By the time his first two novels were published, he was deeply in debt to his editor and had been forced into the lifetime pattern of writing for money and against his will...

...they also alter the reader's subsequent perceptions of literature...

...Though his Siberian exile was an agonizing experience, recorded in The House o/ the Dead, Frank writes in a moving conclusion that it would also "widen the range of his moral and psychological experience...

...His radicalism and burning hatred of serfdom, for which he risked his life, had an emotional as well as an intellectual basis...

...In this novel, the polonaise is not a "formal dance...

...Dostoevsky's promising literary career was truncated by his revolutionary intrigues, for in 1848 he recognized that the new freedom granted to people in western Europe was countered by severe repression in Russia...

...houses of Poland, France, and England...

...Both write works about society, which for Read is the cafes, restaurants, flats, and country "Challenging," "daring," "provocative," "shattering" are some of the adjectives applied to the German and Italian editions of this book...

...13 May 1977:310 Dostoevsky's first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was a sentimental tragicomedy, an effective and original synthesis of his Russian predecessors which portrayed sensitivity and moral refinement among the lowest class of people...

...In April 1849, before they could even agree to a plan of action, Dostoevsky was awakened at 4 A.M...

...Polonaise even takes momentary symbolic interest in the French, post-Renaissance art which gives Powell his title...

...It was acclaimed by Belinsky, the leading critic of the time, as the first social novel in Russian, and was an immediate success...

...by an ofiicer of the secret police and was suddenly thrown into a new existence that would strain his spiritual and emotional capacities to the utmost...

...Cloth $6.95 THE CHURCH AND THIRD WORLD REVOLUTION by Pierre Bigo Bigo argues that the Church must not fail now to identify with the poor and oppressed rather than their oppressors...

...Thus it is that I am reminded throughout Polonaise, Piers Paul Read's enormously satisfying sixth novel, of Anthony Powelrs twelvevolumed Dance to the Music of Time...

...I penetrate into everything, I understand with precision, and I myself draw from this the ability to create...

...he would feel the desperate anguish of the hunted...

...As a child Dostoevsky was afraid he would fall into a deathlike sleep and left notes at bedtime begging that his burial be postponed for five days...

...He would know the creeping and chilling despair of total solitude in prison...

...he would live through the terrifying agony of the condemned clinging desperately to the last precious moments of life...

...Read's Kornowskism Stefan and his sister Krystyna--are altogether more passionate and erratic...

...he would sink to the lowest depths of society...

...This is not a conventional biography, primarily concerned with the details of Dostoevsky's life, but an interpretation of his novels, which concern the spiritual crises of the intelligentsia and are a creative synthesis of Russian history, personal fate and literary evolution...

...both, in different ways, end where they begin...

...The Landlady, a symbolic critique of Slavophilism and Russian Orthodoxy...

...and White Nights, an unusually delicate portrayal of adolescent emotions...

...Both internalize the political events of the era, here the Spanish Civil War, the embrace of and apostasy from Marxism, the Stalinist purges, the second great war, and the apoliticism of the fifties...

...Both PoweU and Read cover the recent era--in Polonaise from 1928 to 1958 --under the guiding metaphor of dance...

...It is a movement through life that is motivated by instinct and passion, by the heart in conflict with the intellect and the patterns New from ORBIS THE COMING OF THE THIRD CHURCH Polonaise PIERS PAUL READ Lippincott, $10 GERARD REEDY by Walbert Buhlmann "The best Catholic book of the year...

...Buhlmann sees the Church's mission to humanity entering a new phase, one in which new questions are being asked because the situations in which people find themselves today cannot be handled along time-honored lines...

...Not a book "for specialists only" but for anyone willing to face the future and think...

...Dostoevsky was well-educated and widely read in Russian, French, German and English literature, philosophy and history...

...In his far shorter space, however, Read is altogether more intense in his pursuit of meaning in the thirty-year polonaise of his main character, Stefan Kornowski, who is, like Powelrs narrator, Jenkins, a writer...

...But Dostoevsky's instant fame led to absurd egoism and vanity, and he was satirized in an effective poem by Turgenev--whom Dostoevsky later repaid with the merciless portrait of Karmazinov in The Devils...

...Both self-consciously choreograph repeated gestures and situations, a technique that gives formal unity to their works...

...Joseph Frank goes far beyond the biographies of Simmons and Magarshack in the shrewd examination of evidence, the masterful grasp of Dostoevsky's complexity and the thorough presentation of the intellectual, cultural and social background that shaped his mind and art...

...Cloth $8.95, Paper 4:95 At your bookstore, or write: ~ ORBIS BOOKS Write for complete catalog: ~ Maryknoll, NY 10545 Commonweal: 311...

...KARL RAHNER Great literary works, it is said, not only break through language and form so that other, analogous works may be written...

...his small grey eyes darted somewhat uneasily from object to object, and his colorless lips were nervously contorted...

...Dostoevsky was born in Moscow, the son of a successful doctor, a gloomy martinet given to uncontrollable explosions of temper, and a saintly and sickly mother who died in 1837...

...and his impassioned absorption in books led to a profound and valuable understanding of masters like Pushkin and Gogol, Balzac and George Sand, Schiller and Hoffmann, Scott and Dickens: "I read like a fiend, and reading has a strange effect on me...

...Shortly after he graduated the Academy in 1843 and ioined the Engineering Department of the War Ministry, Dostoevsky was described as "slender, short, fair-haired, with a sickly complexion...