DISCOVERING THE PAST

Wrestling Dostoevsky

A scholar concludes almost 50 years of biographical research with a final volume that reveals the novelist’s dark side.

When Princeton University Press published the fifth volume of his Dostoevsky biography, Joseph Frank was in France with his wife. The man had earned his vacation. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 brings to its conclusion a project that has occupied Mr. Frank for nearly half a century. Beginning with the first volume, in 1976, reviewers have habitually used the words “authoritative” and “definitive” to describe his reconstruction of the novelist’s turbulent life, which he situates in the context of 19th-century Russian and European intellectual history. With the final installment now complete, the expression “masterpiece” seems more or less inevitable.

Mr. Frank, 85, is a professor emeritus of comparative literature and of Slavic languages and literature at Stanford University.

The earlier volumes of Mr. Frank’s biography received awards from the Modem Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle, among many others. More impressive still, they won acclaim from Dostoevsky scholars (who, like the novelist’s characters, are a contentious lot). But his previous triumphs did not make the last volume any easier to complete. The final phase of Dostoevsky’s life made some harsh demands on Mr. Frank as both a scholar and a human being – for in his last decade, the novelist published both literary masterpieces and virulent anti-Semitic screeds.

“I felt a certain resistance to the material,” says Mr. Frank, who is Jewish. “I admired him so much otherwise. There are many things in Dostoevsky that are hard to pin down. He’ll say things that are awful on one page, then the exact opposite on the next. Which one is the real Dostoevsky?” In an early phase of his work, Mr. Frank says, he was inclined to minimize the importance of the more vicious passages in Diary of a Writer (an influential journal of cultural and political commentary, written entirely by the novelist). Even now, Mr. Frank seems reluctant to discuss his confrontation with Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism, except to say that it was “emotionally wearing and trying.”

Caryl Emerson, a professor of Russian and comparative literature at Princeton University (where Mr. Frank also holds the title of professor emeritus of comp lit), read the new book in manuscript. She sees it as a departure for Mr. Frank. “Dostoevsky is one of the great, wild writers. And in the earlier volumes, Joe, with his extraordinary grounding in European thought and literature, was prone to making him sound a little more civilized than he really was,” she says, laughing. With the final book, she says, “the picture of Dostoevsky is of a rounder, more compromised personality.” She singles out for praise Mr. Frank’s analysis of The Brothers Karamazov, calling it “a remarkable full portrait of how the novel grew out of the man.”

While Mr. Frank by no means reduces the great author to a troubled mind with a knack for storytelling, in completing his magnum opus he portrays Dostoevsky – hailed by his contemporaries as a spiritual leader, yet consumed by the ferocity of his own hatreds – as one of the darkest figures in world literature.

“This time,” says Ms. Emer-son, “I think that Joe was willing to put in more despair.”

In examining Mr. Frank’s own biography, it becomes clear that he is a literary scholar by temperament, and an academic by afterthought. In high school, he won a national prize for an essay modestly offering “A Prolegomena to All Future Literary Criticism.” While still a teenager, he published reviews of what he describes as “several books of poetry and some very inferior novels” in the New Masses, a Communist cultural magazine. “I was never a party liner of any kind, though,” he recalls. He made his public farewell to Marxist theory in 1941, with an essay for The Southern Review, a prominent literary journal. He was 23.

He became friends with Alan Tate, the writer and critic who, as editor of The Sewanee Review, published Mr. Frank’s “Spatial Form in Modem Literature” in 1945. More than a half-century later, it remains a standard reference in discussions of modernist aesthetics. Showing an intimate familiarity with literary and philosophical writings in several languages, the essay would have been impressive enough – even if Mr. Frank had not been a man in his mid-20s who had neglected to finish his bachelor’s degree.

On the strength of his publications in literary quarterlies, Mr. Frank was invited to attend the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University in the late 1940s. He left the Bureau of National Affairs in 1950, after receiving a Fulbright scholarship to work in France on a book about Flaubert. When his grant ran out, Mr. Frank supported himself for a year by doing what he calls “some investigative journalism” for the U.S. Embassy. (At the height of the cold war, an American intellectual who could read several languages needed never stay unemployed for long.) And his attention drifted from Madame Bovary to a young French mathematician named Marguerite J. Straus. They were married in 1953.

His Fulbright – combined with later fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Chicago – “helped make me academically respectable,” Mr. Frank says. But even as he made belated and anomalous progress through higher education (skipping directly to his Ph.D., from the University of Chicago, in 1960), formative influences on his work still came from outside academe. When invited to give the Gauss seminar, in 1954, Mr. Frank chose a topic that had first attracted his interest while in Paris: “Existentialist Themes in Modern Literature.” Mr. Frank had already published some essays on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in literary magazines. And as he prepared his lectures, it was inevitable that he would reread “Notes From Underground” – for the ideas expressed by Dostoevsky’s bitter, tormented narrator still echoed in the cafes of the Left Bank.

“What happened,” says Mr. Frank now, “is that I got more and more interested in Dostoevsky and less and less interested in existentialism.” He began to study the cultural context of the novels, and taught himself to read Russian. By the 1960s, Mr. Frank had drafted a book on Dostoevsky’s fiction – a critical study, not a biography. But when he submitted the manuscript to Oxford University Press, it received a negative reader’s report. He quotes one line from memory; it sounds, in retrospect, ironic. “I don’t see how Mr. Frank can write so many pages about Dostoevsky without saying anything about his life.”

Dostoevsky’s study where Brothers Karamazov was written

The Reluctant Biographer

The project grew. Mr. Frank immersed himself in the novelist’s work, as well as historical scholarship on Russian society and culture. His understanding of Dostoevsky’s era was further shaped by discussions with friends in Paris. Among them were members of a circle around Boris Souvarine – a Russian йmigrй who, during the early 1920s, had been a leading figure in the Communist International, until breaking with Stalin. They treated the debates of 19th-century intellectuals as matters of more than purely historical interest. “It was always very stimulating,” Mr. Frank says. “They were very interested in how the social and political issues of Dostoevsky’s time were related to what was going on in the contemporary world.”

When The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 appeared, in 1976, Mr. Frank already expected his project to fill four volumes. But he was still reluctant to call it a biography. “I do not go from the life to the work,” he wrote, “but the other way around.” Maintaining a dispassionately cerebral stance toward Dostoevsky is difficult, however, for the author’s career was lush with melodramatic detail, including mystical experiences, the financial agony wrought by compulsive gambling, and a fairly untidy romantic life. Nonetheless, by 1986 – when the third of what was then projected as five volumes appeared – it seemed that Mr. Frank was managing something quite improbable. While focusing on what he called “the social-cultural and literary context directly linked with creative production,” Mr. Frank was revealing a figure markedly different from the Dostoevsky known to anyone but experts.

The circle of intellectuals to which the young Dostoevsky belonged is often portrayed as an ineffectual bunch of rhetorical revolutionaries, more interested in arguing about Hegel than making bombs. Even a report by a government spy suggested that the group was essentially harmless, making the mock execution appear that much more sadistic. But Mr. Frank shows that Dostoevsky belonged to a smaller group that had grown weary of talk and was preparing to take action. (The leader of that faction may have been the original model for Stavrogin, the horrific revolutionary leader in The Possessed.) And to complicate the picture even more, Mr. Frank argues that Dostoevsky had been an Orthodox believer even as a young radical. His early socialist novels were not acts of rebellion against his Christian upbringing but, rather, manifestations of his faith.

Mr. Frank sees the novelist’s later political beliefs not as a misanthropic response to imprisonment with the dregs of society but as the exact opposite: “Dostoevsky’s faith in the innately Christian virtues of the Russian peasantry, which he felt he could discern even under the repellent exteriors of hardened peasant criminals,” he writes, “became a crucial, if highly questionable, cornerstone of his later ideology.” Dostoevsky’s ire was reserved for the intelligentsia, which he thought could not appreciate the masses’ simple reverence for their czar.

Mr. Frank drew on critical and historical sources in a number of languages but he says that one body of research in particular played a crucial role in his understanding of the novelist: the work of Russian editors who, during the Soviet era, worked under difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances. Under Communism, Dostoevsky scholarship was tolerated but not encouraged. Given his later czarist politics and religious fervor, he was fit for denunciation, not careful interpretation. Yet the author’s undeniable importance as a figure in Russian literature meant that a few scholars could work on editions of his texts.

On his trips to Paris, Mr. Frank says, he would seek out copies of the Soviet editions. “You could sense from reading the footnotes that the editors had reached conclusions about Dostoevsky they weren’t able to state because of censorship,” he says. Part of his work involved drawing out the implications hidden between the lines – in effect, finishing the portrait that Soviet scholars could visualize but not paint. “If they’d been able to do it,” he adds, “I wouldn’t have needed to.”

In the Slavic Review, one critic described Mr. Frank’s Russian translations as “generally rather stilted and stodgy” – and complained that he had not even given the date of Dostoevsky’s mother’s death. But the same reviewer praised Mr. Frank for providing the best survey in any language of the author’s life and times.

That judgment has been echoed in most professional discussions of the biography. In the Bulletin of the International Dostoevsky Society, a German reviewer called Mr. Frank’s work “unparalleled a veritable encyclopedia of Dostoevsky scholarship.”

The heart of Mr. Frank’s work, by his own account, is Dostoevsky’s fiction. And there is a clear consensus on his critical approach: Mr. Frank’s treatment of the novels displays what one reviewer termed “a traditionalistic bias.” He avoids interpretations influenced by more recent work in critical theory; rather, his reading of the fiction is guided primarily by his understanding of the author’s intention, and fortified by an impressive knowledge of comparative literary history.

In chronicling the author’s early years, Mr. Frank included accounts of several minor works that critics had seldom discussed. But the last two volumes cover Dostoevsky’s “great period” – the awe-inspiring flood of major works he published in rapid succession after 1865, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. The leading characters often embody the belief that God is dead, and live out the consequences of their efforts to assume His place. Opponents of Dostoevsky, then and now, have often considered his treatment of the Russian intelligentsia to be slanderous. By examining Dostoevsky’s role in arguing about “the new ideas” in the Russian press during the 1860s and ’70s, Mr. Frank places his major novels in their contemporary context. And he suggests that, however vigorously Dostoevsky may have exercised his artistic license, the characters in the novels were recognizable facsimiles of reality.

Dear Fyodor

In the final decade of Dostoevsky’s life, he began to emerge not merely as one novelist among several in Russian literature, but rather as something like a national sage – thanks largely to Diary of a Writer, his one-man magazine. Readers from all over Russia wrote him with their questions about philosophy, politics, literature, and their private lives. As Mr. Frank notes, the flow of essays and sketches in the monthly journal assumed a more intimate tone than anything the novelist had published before; the great author was in dialogue with his public in the most direct possible way.

“In writing each volume,” Mr. Frank says of his biography, “I had a sort of crisis at some point, trying to figure out how to organize the material. This time, the trouble came from dealing with the Diary.” His work on Dostoevsky’s personal journalism proved to be a kind of time bomb. Mr. Frank had completed the book and submitted it.

“My wife read the chapters on the Diary and said, well, this isn’t very good. All I had done was give a running summary of what Dostoevsky wrote in the magazine. I reread the manuscript and saw she was absolutely right. I couldn’t face myself in the mirror without reworking those chapters,” he says. It took about five months to revise the manuscript, transforming his month-by-month synopsis of the Diary into a thematic analysis of its contents. Publication was delayed a year.

The work was particularly grueling because of the Diary’s wildly inconsistent but generally hateful attitude toward Russian Jews. Dostoevsky was capable of penning an encomium to the Christian spirit of universal brotherhood and making vicious remarks about “the kikes” a few pages later.

“Then Dostoevsky will write something like that sketch [in the Diary] of a Christian doctor attending the birth of a baby in the home of a poor Jewish family that is just beautiful,” Mr. Frank says.

To complete the research project that had occupied him for almost five decades, it seems, Mr. Frank had to immerse himself – one last time – in the pages where Dostoevsky expressed the “hate and destructive forces” shaping his own view of the world.

Armchair psychoanalysis aside, one wonders what it feels like to complete an epic of scholarship. Elation? Depression?

“Neither,” says Mr. Frank. “I wonder sometimes how I am going to occupy my time now. With the other volumes, when I was done, I never had to wonder what I’d be doing next.”

Tomb of Fyodor Dostoevsky, in the Tikhvin Cemetery

By Scott Mclemee