Dostoevsky and His Demons
Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism: Volume 1: In the Beginning, 1821–1845
Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism: Volume 2: The Gathering Storm, 1846–1847
Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life
Lectures on Dostoevsky
How should one narrate the life of a great writer? Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, now supplemented by his Lectures on Dostoevsky, revivified the form by situating the novelist within the ideological struggles of his day. The many fascinating primary sources about Dostoevsky’s life inspired Thomas Marullo to experiment with a new kind of biography in his brilliant Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism. (A third volume is still to come.) The novelist Alex Christofi was similarly inspired, and while his innovative biography, Dostoevsky in Love, occasionally intrigues, it ultimately offers little that’s new. All three recognize the difficulty of distinguishing Dostoevsky’s actual life from the legends about him.
