Lectures on Dostoevsky

"‘Lectures’ makes it sound more academic than it is, in a way. Joseph Frank was probably the leading scholar on Dostoevsky working in any language. He wrote an incredible five-volume biography of Dostoevsky , probably 2500-pages long. It took about 25 years to finish. He worked at Princeton and later Stanford, and he created this undergraduate lecture series, to bring people up to speed in a short space of time. These lectures were published for the first time at the end of 2019. They’re a really good way to start learning about Dostoevsky, because he gives you just enough to really understand where he was coming from at these different moments in his life. It doesn’t cover all his books, but the important ones – with the notable exception of Devils – including his first and last work. So you could read this pretty short book and get a good sense of the man and the world he was born into. And you’re getting it from one of the world’s leading experts. As a starting point, I think Lectures on Dostoevsky is more accessible than that vast biography might be. Yes. Let me give you the three-minute version. Dostoevsky was born in a hospital for the poor. His father was a doctor, and had just about managed to climb onto the lowest rung of the hereditary nobility, basically through hard work, firstly as an army surgeon. So Fyodor grew up on the grounds of this hospital, looking out of the window at all these sick people in dressing gowns. It wasn’t a particularly lovely childhood, but they did manage to buy this very rundown estate outside of Moscow. He loved going there in the summer with his mother. Unfortunately, while he was still pretty young, his mother died of consumption and the estate burned down in an accidental fire. Later his father died – either from alcoholism or because he was murdered by his peasants, who hated him. “He became a literary sensation, literally overnight” Dostoevsky ends up in an engineering academy in St Petersburg, but he really wanted to be a novelist. He just about finished his degree, but anyone who knows anything about him would be terrified to walk on a bridge made by Dostoevsky, put it that way. It would be a structural nightmare. He quickly decided he would rather be poor, as long as he could be a writer. He wrote his first book, Poor Folk , and gave it to a friend of a friend who worked for a magazine one day in spring – during those lovely white nights that you get in St Petersburg, where it barely gets dark. He gave it to the guy, went out and had some drinks, came home at 4am. And the critic burst into the room, telling him he’s a literary genius and that he’s already shared a copy with the most important critic in all of Russia . Six hours later, the other critic agreed. Suddenly he was a literary sensation. Literally overnight. Well, he fell out with those friends quite quickly, and ended up in a second literary circle, which was more dangerous and plotting revolution… basically he fell in with the wrong crowd. He was caught, sentenced to death, subjected to a mock execution and sent off for years of hard labour in Siberia. So he was out there in the freezing cold, pounding alabaster and breaking up barges for several years. Released as an army private, he fell in love with someone else’s wife, Maria. That guy also died of alcoholism, so he married her – but they had a deeply unhappy marriage. He managed to get back to St Petersburg, where he wrote these amazing memoirs of his time in prison, which became a total sensation and rehabilitated his literary reputation. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . From there he was well-known and well-respected as a writer, pretty much until the end of his life. But his personal life was still very choppy. He had an affair with a young student called Polina, and ran away to Europe with her–but she was just stringing him along. He became a gambling addict, lost all his money and his beloved brother died. He was completely penniless, so he wrote a novel called The Gambler to pay off his debts; in doing that, he’d given himself such a tight deadline that he hired a stenographer so that he could actually write it in the month he had – and got on really well with her. They went on to have four children, although two of them died. In the 1870s, he developed emphysema and his health worsened, but at least he was happy in love for that last decade of his life. So, yes. Pretty eventful. Writers are generally known for being sat at their desks writing for most of the time. I think he bucks the trend. Yes. There were two types of love that I wanted to talk about. Recent biographies have been very keen to talk about him as an intellectual, and I think most people – at least in terms of the general readership – don’t know much about his personal life. It’s a shame, because he had such a fascinating life and it makes a great story. There’s another kind of love, maybe a gentler definition, which is about how he thought we could try to create a world that we all want to live in; that is, Christian love, compassion. He believed strongly that the world isn’t about good and bad people. It’s about the struggle in each person to act well or badly. We all have the capacity to do either. He really wanted to foster the instinct for love in his readers. I think that’s one of the best ways to read him consistently across his work. Yes, for me, what draws it together is this underlying idea of love."