This long-awaited volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's
widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, does cover a truly miraculous
period of his life-the six most remarkably productive years in the great
novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that
Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels-Crime and Punishment,
The Idiot, and The Devils-and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and
The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of
harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from
place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette.
Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors
and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown
into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a
father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and
Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income.
All the while, he worried that his recurrent epileptic attacks were
impairing his literary capacities. His enforced exile intensified not
only his love for his native land but also his abhorrence of the
doctrines of Russian Nihilism-which he saw as an alien European
importation infecting the Russian psyche. Two novels of this period were
thus an attempt to conjure this looming spectre of moral-social
disintegration, while The Idiot offered an image of Dostoevsky's
conception of the Russian Christian ideal that he hoped would take its
place.
