This fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's justly celebrated literary
and cultural biography of Dostoevsky renders with a rare intelligence
and grace the last decade of the writer's life, the years in which he
wrote A Raw Youth, Diary of a Writer, and his crowning triumph: The
Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky's final years at last won him the universal approval toward
which he had always aspired. While describing his idiosyncratic
relationship to the Russian state, Frank also details Doestoevsky's
continuing rivalries with Turgenev and Tolstoy. Dostoevsky's appearance
at the Pushkin Festival in June 1880, which preceded his death by one
year, marked the apotheosis of his career--and of his life as a
spokesman for the Russian spirit. There he delivered his famous speech
on Pushkin before an audience stirred to a feverish emotional pitch:
"Ours is universality attained not by the sword, but by the force of
brotherhood and of our brotherly striving toward the reunification of
mankind." This is the Dostoevsky who has entered the patrimony of world
literature, though he was not always capable of living up to such
exalted ideals.
The writer's death in St. Petersburg in January of 1881 concludes this
unparalleled literary biography--one truly worthy of Dostoevsky's genius
and of the remarkable time and place in which he lived.
