A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary
biographies of our time
Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely
recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one
of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now
Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and
condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by
the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative
style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary
criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's
works--from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and
The Brothers Karamazov--by setting them in their personal, historical,
and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual
sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia,
providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and
a major reinterpretation of his life and work.