Dostoevsky:  A Writer in His Time
by Joseph Frank.  Edited by Mary Petrusewicz.   Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2010.  P. i – 959

Reviewed by Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

January, and its invitations to hibernate, seems to be the appropriate month for reading ‘big books.’  Truly a book for this month in its Russian and wintry themes.  This work is a stunning example of a book large not only in size but monumentally accomplished intellectually.  This fact is further emphasized when the reader notes that this volume is a condensed version of Frank’s five-volume work on Dostoevsky.  The editor for this enormous task was Frank’s choice and she has done a splendid job of reflecting Frank’s choice of direction for this volume in wanting to emphasize how “his [Dostoevsky’s] books are also inspired by the ideological doctrines of his time.” (xiii).

In attempting to demonstrate how these ideologies play out in character’s lives, Frank identifies what he terms Dostoevsky’s “eschatological imagination.”  In other words, Frank traces through the author’s major works the ways in which “his characters respond to such consequences [of their actions]according to the ordinary moral and social standards prevalent in their milieu, and it is the fusion of these two levels that provides Dostoevsky’s novels with both their imaginative range and their realistic grounding social life.” (xiv-xv).

What makes this work so readable is that Frank has the ability to chart Dostoevsky’s life in a way that actually reads like the dramas of this Russian’s array of great classics.  The work provides a massive look at the political, social, religious, political and religious movements of the 19^th century.  Dostoevsky’s life is lived through these vectors with a personality afflicted by a passionate religious perspective, fits of epilepsy, a tumultuous personal life  and a man who finances were always precarious,  damaged in addition by his addiction to roulette gambling.

What claims a theologian’s interest for this work is Frank’s thorough discussions of how the person of Christ is viewed by Dostoevsky.  Dostoevsky’s descriptions of Christ in his works, as well as his life, are touched with deep passion.  He understands Christ’s presence in a vivid way and yet always blocked at some points by human egoism.  Dostoevsky takes up other Christian themes such as universal love, reconciliation, forgiveness and the many ways that he struggles with these, all viewed through the lens of Russian Orthodoxy.  Living in a century, which Albert Schweitzer would later summarize in his 1904 The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Dostoevsky’s focus on Christ is not peripheral, but significantly intersects  movements of all types that involved nineteenth-century orthodoxy, atheism, political and social life that were racking all of Europe during his times.

This is a magnificent book.  It can be read in many ways:  political history, a biography of a religious life, a literary companion for reading Dostoevsky’s works and a mirror of nineteenth century Russia thought and political activity and one author’s responses to it.