Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested, led to a platform, tied to a stake, and blindfolded before a firing squad. As his biographer Joseph Frank describes the scene: “A cart with coffins could be seen on the side, and a priest came carrying a cross, which they all kissed; some made confessions. The order was given for the rifles to be raised, and this was done; but then the drums of the regiment surrounding the square began to beat retreat.” Dostoevsky was an ex-army officer, so he understood the meaning of this. One can imagine the way he would have slid against the pole, weeping and deflated, realizing he had been spared his execution. For Dostoevsky, this moment provided a turning point in his life. Whereas he had previously been part of a revolutionary group intent on reconstructing a socialist utopia, this experience disabused him of these fantasies. His nonchalance regarding whether Christ was of one or two natures transformed into a vehement devotion to Christ’s divinity. And, after his seven years of prison in Siberia, he understood how false were his earlier caricatures of Russian peasants. In Lectures on Dostoevsky, Frank walks through this transformation, beginning with Dostoevsky’s biography, moving through each of his novels, not merely the most famous five that followed his conversion, and thus, readers witness how his brush with death transformed his work from realistic fables to stories resonant with, in Frank’s words, “eschatological apprehension.”
For scholars of Dostoevsky, Frank’s five-volume biography is indispensable. But many of us were thankful when those 2500 pages were condensed into a more approachable one-volume abridgment Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009). Now, we have his lectures from his annual course at Stanford University, a book we can recommend to students and Dostoevsky aficionados without a lengthy apology that the work is not pretentious and the insistence not to fear its imposing size. Lectures on Dostoevsky lets readers sit in on Frank’s course; we can imagine him in his Crime and Punishment baseball cap regaling us on Dostoevsky with his characteristic modesty and humility. As critic Robin Feuer Miller writes of Frank in the Foreword, “[Frank] wears his immense knowledge lightly; he renders the complex into the seemingly simple; he does not insert himself into the work but chooses instead to offer steady support to the student or the reader.” Frank is the kind of teacher we all want when we read Dostoevsky—someone to make sense not merely of passages but of the whole, someone who does not provide a Frank-ean reading but tries to set before us Dostoevsky as Dostoevsky himself desired to be read.
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