Scholarly Identification Without Analysis

...He fastened on Dostoevsky's epilepsy and made it the complicated symbolic expression of the writer's spiritual complicity in his father's murder by serfs...

...Then, in a startling but convincing footnote, based on a recent examination of local records, Frank suggests that the Dostoevsky family, Freud and everyone else for a century and a third have been wrong in saying the elder Dostoevsky was killed by his mistreated serfs...

...Now, almost 20 years later, comes this volume ending just before Dostoevsky's arrest for treason in 1849...

...When 20 years ago he was asked to lecture at Princeton on French Existentialism, he chose Dostoevsky as a precursor, focusing on Notes from the Underground...

...After his penal servitude Dostoevsky married twice, had a mistress and intense affairs with still other women...

...Describing Dostoevsky's work as "a brilliant artistic synthesis of the major issues of his time," Frank limits his own task primarily to presenting his subject "in the context of a massive reconstruction of the social-cultural life of his period...

...Nor does it tell us why the synthesis—if synthesis it is—continues to speak strongly to our own period, to exert demands on us in a way that Tolstoy and Turgenev do not, demands to which Nietzsche, Gide, Berdyaev and many others have so variously responded...

...Reserved though Frank is in this first volume, he still teaches us a great deal about Dostoevsky...

...His most crucial relationship was with Belinsky, whom Lenin and the Stalinists praised above all 19th-century Russian radicals...

...In the body of the book Frank has little difficulty demonstrating that Dostoevsky did not suffer epileptic seizures before being sent to Siberia...

...His ideas, drawing on the 18th-century Laocoon of Gotthold Lessing and a later work by William Worringer, Perception and Empathy, were immensely helpful to graduate students of English, who mostly find German philosophy repellent...

...But after the European revolutions of 1848 and the frightened Tsarist reaction to them, he went so far as to try to recruit a friend for an underground cell with an illegal printing press...

...Frank appears to have no governing ideas of his own, no sense of excitement over the analytic possibilities that inspired "Spatial Form...

...Later he repudiated this as a contradiction...

...he exclaimed that the author "reveals such secrets of life and character in Russia as no one before him even dreamed of it's the first attempt at a social novel we've had...

...There Frank defined a mythic reaction against history that he discovered both in modern painters' denials of natural space and modern novelists' denials of actual time...

...But Bahktin goes far beyond language in a relation of form to the alienated or organic that recalls what Frank had taken earlier from William Worringer...

...Better trained under his father's tutelage and in the military engineering schools than has been generally realized, stimulated by a series of fortunate literary friendships including that with his brother Mikhail, Dostoevsky was a voracious reader and systematically educated himself in history, economics and social theory...

...In his "Survey of Russian Literature in 1846" Belinsky wrote, "All the shortcomings of Poor Folk which were pardonable in a first essay have appeared in The Double as enormities...

...Psychoanalytically it does not matter so long as Dostoevsky believed in the murder...

...Frank decided to devote his life to what he calls his "vision" of Dostoevsky...

...In subsequent volumes, Frank will be forced by the very nature of the major novels he will be treating to engage himself with permanent moral questions...

...The Dostoevskyan hero, on the contrary, born of an "accidental family," is thrown into unusual and unexpected situations at "the service of an idea...

...In the usual biographical novel?the Tolstoyan, for instance—there is organic causative unity of the characters with family, nature and BERTRAND RUSSELL TODAY Magazine offers philosophic alternatives to religion...

...After "Spatial Form" Frank wrote comparatively little, but in the Foreword to his one collection of articles, The Widening Gyre (1963), Allen Tate called Frank's "the most original critical mind to appear in America since the Second World War...

...Prior to Siberia his passionate, creatively productive relationships seemed all to be with men...

...Yet this is one further fascinating complication in seeking the psychological-political sources of Dostoevsky's radicalism and subsequent reversion to Tsar-ism...

...Box 431, Jerome Avenue Station, Bronx, N.Y...

...Freud, however, was not content to stick to the novel...

...Friends noted that Dostoevsky's voice trembled with emotion whenever he mentioned the condition of the serfs...

...This is the story of a young girl, only 18 when the novel breaks off, who after a strange passion for her stepfather that alienated her from her mother, falls in love with a princess who similarly adores her father and hates her mother...

...This meant learning Russian and working with some of the best scholars in the field, such as Rufus Mathewson and Robert Belknap at Columbia and Yale's Victor Erlich, the great expert on Russian formalism...

...In that letter, whose reading cost Dostoev-sky 10 years in Siberia, Belinsky said the government well knew "how the landowners treat their peasants and how many of the former are annually done away with by the latter...

...Frank's rather plodding survey of Dostoevsky's pre-Siberian writings is far less interesting than his recreation of the cultural and political milieu of the period...

...it is the first of four that are intended to make up the most complete and authoritative study of Dostoevsky ever written...

...society...

...What Frank prefers is an objective, meticulous, highly intelligent reconstruction of Dostoevsky's reading and conversation during the four years between his being an anonymous Army cadet and being acclaimed as a genius by Belinsky before he had published a word...

...A principal charge at his trial was his reading aloud at a meeting the famous letter written to Gogol by V. G. Belinsky, Russia's leading critic, after Gogol turned reactionary and defended serfdom...

...He especially read and translated French writers: Hugo, Balzac, George Sand...

...Dostoevsky could explain them, but they could not explain Dostoevsky...

...What all this implies and how it bears on the character of the fiction before and after Siberia Frank will not say, even in discussing the novel Notchka Nezvanova, left unfinished when Dostoevsky was arrested...

...After all, old Karamazov had not one son but four: One of them killed him, another nearly did, and the other two were guilty in their hearts...

...Jealous from the beginning, the members of Belinsky's coterie now became cruelly derisive...

...They were broad appreciations of writers like Mann, Malraux, Ortega y Gasset and Trilling, who shared Frank's worries about the survival of human dignity...

...When Belinsky read the manuscript of Dostoevsky's Poor Folk he was electrified...

...He includes just one quotation from Mikhail Bahktin, and devotes a single paragraph to Bahk-tin's sense of the "dialogic" nature of Dostoevsky's language, which he finds "extreme...

...But he finds it much more illuminating to show how powerfully and distinctively Dostoevsky revives an ancient genre, Menippean satire, that has kept recurring because it shares the spirit, equally ancient and recurrent, of the saturnalia or carnival...

...Surprisingly, considering how his career began, he virtually ignores the Russian formalists...

...The project will be of great value as literary and intellectual history...

...In any case, the new essays no longer concentrated on form and perception...

...The Widening Gyre had little impact, partly 'because it came out just when the flood tide of French structuralism was beginning to rise and the structuralists were more indebted to Russian formalism than to German esthetics...

...Dostoevsky wanted a Christian socialism that would preserve moral freedom and responsibility...

...Anyone with Dostoevsky on his conscience will look forward eagerly to future installments, hoping that no more years will separate them than occurred between Dostoevsky's graduating from engineering school and suddenly finding himself famous...

...Inventor of the Oedipus complex, obsessed with death wishes against fathers, Freud was naturally delighted by The Brothers Karamazov, declaring it the best novel ever written...

...He did not go to pieces until after his wife's death...

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...Philosophic confession combines with criminal adventure in a fictional medium that correspondingly mixes genres...

...Dostoevsky was deeply fond of his mother...

...The carnival spirit is expressed with masks and grotesque satire, a reversal of social positions, ludic or ritual combats like that of the bullfight, secret parody, licensed blasphemy or profanation, the mock crowning and uncrowning of a temporary king to which Jesus was subjected...

...This approach lends itself to a conventional scholarly identification of influences, without explaining why Dostoevsky (or any other writer) transcends those influences and makes something of them that could not possibly have been anticipated...

...Before the critic's early death in 1848, Belinsky was demanding the kind of straight social realism that has been canonical in Soviet Russia for 50 years...

...Critical of Freud, Frank is himself not in the least psychoanalytical...

...Bahktin shows how the morbid self-consciousness of Dostoevsky's central characters is reflected in their language, that there is "almost no word in Dostoevsky that does not take an intense sideways glance at another person's word...

...As his interest in Dostoevsky mounted, his interest in French existentialists declined...

...And he shows the elder Dostoevsky to have been a strict yet on the whole good father, who made great sacrifices to see that his boys were well educated...

...Meanwhile Frank had also become obsessed by Dostoevsky...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English, Columbia University Joseph Frank has been famous for a single essay, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," ever since it appeared in a 1945 issue of the Sewanee Review...

...Daniel Manesse challenges Billy Graham to debate...

...Instead of going on to explain why, Frank sends the reader to an untranslated Soviet article...

...Like Frank, Bahktin discusses Dostoevsky's reading of contemporary writing—Sue, Gogol, newspaper feuilletons...

...By the time Poor Folk was published Belinsky's judgment was more qualified, and he was strongly critical of Dostoevsky's succeeding publications...

...He makes only one oblique reference to Dostoevsky's sexual activities and imaginings in these first 28 years of his life, though if there was truth to the assertions that Dostoev-sky had been guilty of a sexual assault on a little girl it probably occurred during this period...

...Critically and ideologically, though, the opening book is rather disappointing...

...Send $1.?P.O...

...Frank takes us skillfully through the debates Dostoevsky was profoundly involved in, first between the two romanticisms, French and German, and then between French social reformism, more or less Christian in nature, and the atheistic, materialistic neo-Hegelianism that developed into Marxism...

...Frank is content to describe Dostoevsky's work as "a synthesis of the major issues of his time.' By moving beyond that time to persisting historical forms and social rituals, Bahktin opens the way for a similarly diachronic appreciation of Dostoevsky's preoccupation with the problems of authority and love, crime and punishment, freedom and responsibility—problems that remain the same in every epoch, however different the attempts to solve them...

...He had to have an actual murder, just as in his explanation of original sin and the crucifixion in Totem and Taboo he had to posit a moment in prehistory when sons, kept from women in a primal horde, got together to murder their father and eat him, only to feel guilty ever after and somehow transmit that feeling to us...

...The one instance where Frank does look ahead and speak in his own right is his attack on Freud...

...Yet Bahktin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, available although still not sufficiently known in this country, is perhaps the most brilliant work of criticism to come out of the Soviet Union...

...Freud could not be content with unconscious murderous wishes...

...He reprints as an appendix a critique he wrote for the Times Literary Supplement of Freud's famous essay, "Dostoevsky and Parricide...

...It appeared originally in 1929 and was only reissued (in revised form) in 1963, when the thaw made serious discussion of Dostoevsky possible again...