Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871 - Rilegato

Frank, Joseph

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691043647 ISBN 13: 9780691043647

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1995

Riassunto

This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas,The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. All the while, he worried that his recurrent epileptic attacks were impairing his literary capacities. His enforced exile intensified not only his love for his native land but also his abhorrence of the doctrines of Russian Nihilism--which he saw as an alien European importation infecting the Russian psyche. Two novels of this period were thus an attempt to conjure this looming spectre of moral-social disintegration, whileThe Idiot offered an image of Dostoevsky's conception of the Russian Christian ideal that he hoped would take its place.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

Winner of the 1995 Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa
"[Dostoevsky] is the genius who has done the most to illumine nineteenth-century Russian psychology and to make the terrifying problems of atheism and nihilism part of the modernism we still grapple with. Frank's magisterial five-volume study of his life and work ... salutes the grandeur of Dostoevsky's project."--Lesley Chamberlain, The [London] Times

"In his aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote-personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other-Frank has succeeded triumphantly."--J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

"[Frank's] high contribution is to chronicle the life and elaborate the social-political-cultural matrix in which to consider the writings, and to do this more thoroughly and comprehensively than has been previously done."--Stephen Jan Parker, The New York Times Book Review

"For a reader ready to grapple with the most powerful ideas and feelings in Dostoevsky's extraordinary life and work, this book is a godsend."--Irwin Weil, The Washington Post Book World

Contenuti:

List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Transliteration and Texts xv
PART I: SOME "STRANGE, 'UNFINISHED' IDEAS"
Chapter 1: Introduction 3
Chapter 2: "The Unhappiest of Mortals" 9
Chapter 3: Khlestakov in Wiesbaden 25
Chapter 4: "Our Poor Little Defenseless Boys and Girls" 42
Chapter 5: The Sources of Crime and Punishment 60
Chapter 6: From Novella to Novel 80
Chapter 7: A Reading of Crime and Punishment 96
PART II: REMARRIAGE
Chapter 8: "A Little Diamond" 151
Chapter 9: The Gambler 170
Chapter 10: Escape and Exile 184
Chapter 11: Turgenev and Baden-Baden 204
Chapter 12: Geneva: Life among the Exiles 223
PART III: A RUSSIAN IDEAL
Chapter 13: In Search of a Novel 241
Chapter 14: "A Perfectly Beautiful Man" 256
Chapter 15: An Inconsolable Father 276
Chapter 16: Across the Alps 294
Chapter 17: The Idiot 316
Chapter 18: Historical Visions 342
PART IV: THE PAMPHLET AND THE POEM
Chapter 19: The Life of a Great Sinner 365
Chapter 20: The Eternal Husband 382
Chapter 21: Fathers, Sons, and Stavrogin 396
Chapter 22: Exile's Return 413
Chapter 23: History and Myth in The Devils: I 435
Chapter 24: History and Myth in The Devils: ii 453
Chapter 25: The Book of the Impostors 472
Chapter 26: Conclusion 499
Abbreviations 503
Notes 505
Index 517

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0691043647
• ISBN 13: 9780691043647
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 523