The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Monumental” and “magisterial” are words that have surfaced repeatedly in response to Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky project, the first four volumes of which appeared in 1976, 1983, 1986 and 1995. Now the largest volume, “The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881,” covering the last decade of the writer’s life, completes the series. Frank’s work is, as reviewers (myself among them) have consistently testified, unrivaled in what it sets out to do and in the remarkable degree to which it succeeds in doing it.

It is unquestionably the fullest, most nuanced and evenhanded--not to mention the most informative--account of its subject in any language, and it has significantly changed our understanding of both the man and his work.

Frank’s originality lies in the way he manages to chart, at the same time, the evolution of Dostoevsky the man, of Dostoevsky the writer, of the writings themselves and--perhaps most original--of the changing times that did so much to shape all three. Frank writes as a biographer, literary historian, critic and historian of 19th century Russian culture in the belief that only such a multi-pronged approach can yield a proper appreciation of the art that is Dostoevsky’s first and ultimate claim on our attention.

What is unprecedented in these volumes, apart from the wealth of detail, is Frank’s perception, as he puts it in his preface, that Dostoevsky’s great novels bring into focus all the problems of mid-19th century Russian culture--”not, to be sure, on the level on which they ordinarily appeared to his contemporaries, but transforming them in terms of his own eschatological and messianic vision.” The creative process may be fated to remain a mystery on its intimate side, but Frank shows just how much illumination can come from studying the kinds of transformation he speaks of here.

The Dostoevsky who emerges from the pages of Frank’s earlier volumes is a man strikingly less eccentric and extreme than he has usually been taken to be. By toning him down, Frank was clearly trying to combat some crude cliches about his unbalanced genius. But one result was to make Dostoevsky’s circumstances more vivid than his personality or temperament.

Now, perhaps in tacit acknowledgment that this may have introduced another kind of imbalance, Frank shows a constant readiness to “acknowledge the intemperance that so often overcame him when his nerves were frayed,” his “prickliness of character” (“well known and ill-famed”), his “sudden explosions of uncontrollable rage,” the fact that he was not “an easy person to live with under any circumstances.” More than that, Frank now volunteers judgments: “Dostoevsky could be unpardonably rude”; a “vicious” remark about his rival Turgenev is “slanderous and totally unjustified,” showing “Dostoevsky at his worst”; while a reference to expatriate liberals contains “what can only be considered an unworthy taunt.”

But there is worse. In the period covered by this book, Dostoevsky became a public figure, making speeches, pouring out a stream of highly personal journalism in his “Diary of a Writer,” setting forth an ecstatic vision of Russia as the only bulwark against godless modernity and the Russian people as the only repository of authentic Christianity, destined to bring a new order of love and brotherhood to the inferior peoples of the world (by force of arms, if necessary).

The problem for Frank (and for any admirer of Dostoevsky) is that this passionate utopianism carried with it a no less passionate xenophobia, a hatred that, as Frank notes, “extended to every people not of Great Russian origin and is most obvious”--that is, virulent--”in relation to the Jews.”

Frank devotes a lot of uneasy attention to this problem. Anti-Semitic references, he finds, appear occasionally in the earlier novels, but Frank calls them “not particularly abusive if judged by the standards of his time and place.” He even tries hard to come up with excuses for the casually contemptuous treatment of the Jewish fireman who witnesses Svidrigailov’s suicide in “Crime and Punishment.”

But the personal loathing for the Jews that erupted in the 1870s is something else. Dostoevsky now took every opportunity to rant against “Yids” and “Yiddism” and to excoriate “the crowd of triumphant Jews and kikes that has thrown itself on Russia.”

Quoted at length in Frank’s pages, this anti-Semitic frenzy makes hard and repulsive reading, and Frank can offer no explanation beyond conjecturing that Dostoevsky may have needed to find a scapegoat “for the disappointments, frustrations and social-economic upheavals that had plunged Russian life into turmoil since the liberation of the serfs.” Repeatedly he brands it as shocking and inexcusable, but he adamantly avoids treating it as integral to Dostoevsky’s character or temperament (he does the same with what he calls Dostoevsky’s “gambling mania”), concluding only that it leaves “a permanent stain on his reputation.”

What is most interesting, and newest, in this volume is the picture Frank gives of other changes in the writer and in the Russian society that he depicted and hoped so much to influence. Central here were changing beliefs in the new cohort of young radicals, changes that made it possible for Dostoevsky to assume the mantle of the prophet. Although, only a decade before, radical young people had rejected moral and ethical considerations in the name of “science”--think of Turgenev’s Bazarov in “Fathers and Children”--now they were being swept up into the Populist movement and “going to the people” to bring enlightenment.

This amounted to a reinstatement of moral and ethical considerations; it meant, as Frank puts it, that Socialism was once again--as in the days of Dostoevsky’s own youthful radicalism--being regarded as the realization of the ideals of Christ on Earth. Here was a position with which the writer could once again sympathize, as was the Populist reverence for the Russian peasantry.

It was on the strength of these shared beliefs that he was able to find an audience among the younger generation and to gain (despite the reactionary nature of many of his political beliefs) a unique position in the life of his country. That he was a bundle of the most startling contradictions only served to underline his independence. It was, Frank contends, a broad public that read the monthly installments of his “Diary of a Writer” (despite the fact that its circulation seems to have stayed under 1,000).

In it they found provocative treatments of the questions of the day interspersed with literary reminiscences and short fictions. Everybody could find something to sympathize with as well as to reject in him. After all, this was the man who had suffered eight years of prison and exile for his earlier radicalism. Besides, whatever else one might say, he was a great novelist and passionately concerned with the fate of Russia and Russians.

Frank is very good on the “Diary,” citing both its appealing and appalling aspects and noting how many of the themes Dostoevsky first broached in it would go into “The Brothers Karamazov,” where their being incarnated by the vivid characters rendered them more problematic, more agonistic and thus less stark and unpalatable. (Dostoevsky seems to have realized this at least partially. In a self-justifying letter, he appeals not to the nature of art but to the shortcomings of readers, claiming that any bald statement of anyone’s basic beliefs would be taken as ludicrous: “Generally speaking, man doesn’t like the ultimate word”--full, explicit candor--”in anything.”)

Frank is, if anything, even better on Dostoevsky’s art in this period. He explains the relative failure of “A Raw Youth” as a consequence of the writer’s self-censorship once he had agreed to publish it in the leading Populist journal, whose readership he wished to court. And he gives discerning readings of a handful of shorter works. But the centerpiece is what he does not hesitate to call Dostoevsky’s greatest novel, “The Brothers Karamazov.”

Devoting some 200 pages to this novel, Frank details its evolution in masterly fashion, citing letters and notes to clarify the writer’s intentions and showing how the book refracts all his major preoccupations--the conflict between reason and Christian faith, the weakening of the family, the untenability (as he saw it) of moral standards once divorced from religious belief.

In his patient analysis of the text, book by book, Frank demonstrates repeatedly how it embodies the novelist’s conviction that conveying his sense of reality required not just “realistic” detail and not just social and psychological accuracy but the irradiation of all by some transcendent ideal. Frank is acute in pointing out what I would call Dostoevsky’s use of concentricities, the way he refracts “a thematic motif through a succession of characters, each of whom expresses a different aspect or level of its meaning.”

And he dispels, once and for all, the common misunderstanding of what makes suffering a positive moral value for Dostoevsky: It was a value for him if and only if it came from “an inner wrestling with the self.”

Three months after completing this novel, Dostoevsky, who had long suffered from emphysema, died peacefully in his sleep. His funeral was like nothing Russia had ever seen. Fifteen choirs and some 30,000 mourners from the most disparate levels of society made up the cortege. Frank’s story concludes on a note of triumph, stressing how, after a decade of being constantly in the public eye, Dostoevsky had finally become “a revered, symbolic figure who seemed to stand above the merciless battle of ideologies.”

That Frank does not indicate how briefly that moment was to last is a reminder of the exclusions that are the price of his achievement. He makes it possible to appreciate, as never before, the accomplishments of Dostoevsky in his time and place, but there is scarcely a word about his posthumous life in Russia or outside it. Frank gives a vivid sense of the odds Dostoevsky overcame, what he struggled with, the unique cultural phenomenon he became (and not only as a writer of fiction), but he pays virtually no attention to what we don’t know (and want to know) about Dostoevsky (and his characters).

When dealing with matters of this kind, common sense gets you only so far. There is too little darkness in Frank’s picture. He seems determined to deny intractable mystery in the books or in their author, just as he shows scant interest in the ways that art regularly transcends specifiable intention.

The magisterial tone turns Olympian at times, dismissing unnamed critics whose arguments are deplored but not considered. Russian words are flaunted unnecessarily (and not always correctly) in the text. The author of this imposing work, in short, is human: Small wonder that he has left parts of the Dostoevsky puzzle intact.

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From ‘The Mantle of the Prophet’

The last ten years of Dostoevsky’s life ... mark the end of an extraordinary literary career and of a life that touched both the heights and depths of Russian society. It became customary during these years, even among people who disagreed (and sometimes quite violently) with Dostoevsky on social-political issues, to regard him with a certain reverence, and to feel that his words incarnated a prophetic vision illuminating Russia and its destiny. ... The unprecedented stature he attained astonished even his friends and admirers, and transcended all personal and political boundaries. In the eyes of the vast majority of the literate public, he became a living symbol of all the suffering that history had imposed on the Russian people, as well as of all their longing for an ideal world of (Christian) brotherly love and harmony.