The term "biography" seems insufficiently capacious to describe the
singular achievement of Joseph Frank's five-volume study of the life of
the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. One critic, writing upon
the publication of the final volume, casually tagged the series as the
ultimate work on Dostoevsky "in any language, and quite possibly
forever."
Frank himself had not originally intended to undertake such a massive
work. The endeavor began in the early 1960s as an exploration of
Dostoevsky's fiction, but it later became apparent to Frank that a
deeper appreciation of the fiction would require a more ambitious
engagement with the writer's life, directly caught up as Dostoevsky was
with the cultural and political movements of mid- and
late-nineteenth-century Russia. Already in his forties, Frank undertook
to learn Russian and embarked on what would become a five-volume work
comprising more than 2,500 pages. The result is an intellectual history
of nineteenth-century Russia, with Dostoevsky's mind as a refracting
prism.
The volumes have won numerous prizes, among them the National Book
Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Christian Gauss Award of Phi
Beta Kappa, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the James Russell
Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.
