Frank J. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

Princeton University Press, 2010. — 980 p. — ISBN: 978-0-691-12819-1.Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language - and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, "Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time" illuminates the writer's works - from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov - by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.