Frank J. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859

Princeton University Press, 1987. — xvi, 320 p. — ISBN: 0-691-06576-4, 0-691-01422-.The present volume is the second in a series dealing with the life and works of Dostoevsky. It will be followed shortly by a third devoted to the next five years of Dostoevsky's life. His literary production was so abundant during this relatively short stretch of time, and Dostoevsky was so intimately involved in all the peripeties of this dramatic moment in Russian history, that it has required a separate volume to depict him adequately at this juncture. This third volume is in the final stages of revision, and should not take too long to appear after the publication of the present one.This response also reassured me that the method I had chosen to follow - the subordination of Dostoevsky's private life to a depiction of his interconnection with the literary and social-cultural history of his time - answered a widely felt need among those who turn to biographies of great writers because of their interest in them as writers. Such an interest cannot be satisfied if most space is given by the biographer to an account of day-to-day existence or events, or if the works are simply dissolved into a running account of the experiences which may (or may not) have served as their genesis. To 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 record, so as to clarify this mysterious mutation. 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 byproduct of the life.File: scanned. page (b/w 300 dpi) + OCR + bookmarks.