Adeath sentence, prison in Siberia, and chronic epilepsy. The death of his young children, a gambling addiction, and possible manic depression. Few writers endure such dark lives or possess such bright creativity as Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky’s incomparable experiences inform many of his novels’ most powerful scenes, from accounts of innocent suffering and crazed revolutionaries to nightmarish epileptic fits. He intended to reflect on his traumatic life by writing a memoir but, aged 59, he died of emphysema. Noting this literary vacuum, in Dostoevsky in Love, Alex Christofi challenges himself to write a sort of third-person memoir for Dostoevsky. Examining the author’s letters, notebooks and journals as well as the leading secondary sources, Christofi attempts a profile of the writer that interweaves his biography with his novels.
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