12 What on earth does it mean to “fly at” somebody? It happens dozens of times in every FMD novel. What, “fly at” them in order to beat them up? To yell at them? Why not say that, if you’re translating? (back to text)
13 Q.v. a random example from Pevear and Volkhonsky’s acclaimed new Knopf rendering of Notes from Underground:“Mr. Ferfichkin, tomorrow you will give me satisfaction for your present words!” I said loudly, pompously addressing Ferfichkin.
“You mean a duel, sir? At your pleasure,” the man answered. (back to text)
14 (… who was, like Faulkner’s Caddie, “doomed and knew it,” and whose heroism consists in her haughty defiance of a doom she also courts. FMD seems like the first fiction writer to understand how deeply some people love their own suffering, how they use it and depend on it. Nietzsche would take Dostoevsky’s insight and make it a cornerstone of his own devastating attack on Christianity, and this is ironic: in our own culture of “enlightened atheism” we are very much Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs, and without Dostoevsky there would have been no Nietzsche, and yet Dostoevsky is among the most profoundly religious of all writers.) (back to text)
15 Frank doesn’t sugar-coat any of this stuff, but from his bio we learn that Dostoevsky’s character was really more contradictory than prickish. Insufferably vain about his literary reputation, he was also tormented his whole life by what he saw as his artistic inadequacies; a leech and a spendthrift, he also voluntarily assumed financial responsibility for his stepson, for the nasty and ungrateful family of his deceased brother, and for the debts of Epoch, the famous literary journal that he and his brother had co-edited. Frank’s new Volume IV makes it clear that it was these honorable debts, rather than general deadbeatism, that sent Mr. and Mrs. FMD into exile in Europe to avoid debtors’ prison, and that it was only at the spas of Europe that Dostoevsky’s gambling mania went out of control. (back to text)
16 Sometimes this allergy is awkwardly striking, as in e.g. the start of part 2 of The Idiot, when Prince Myshkin (the protagonist) has left St. Petersburg for six full months in Moscow: “of Myshkin’s adventures during his absence from Petersburg we can give little information,” even though the narrator has access to all sorts of other events outside St. P. Frank doesn’t say much about FMD’s Muscophobia; it’s hard to figure what exactly it’s about. (back to text)
17 = Poor Folk, a standard-issue “social novel” that frames a (rather goopy) love story with depictions of urban poverty sufficiently ghastly to elicit the approval of the socialist Left. (back to text)
18 It is true that FMD’s epilepsy — including the mystical illuminations that attended some of his preseizure auras — gets comparatively little discussion in Frank’s bio; and reviewers like the London Times’s James L. Rice (himself the author of a book on Dostoevsky and epilepsy) have complained that Frank “gives no idea of the malady’s chronic impact” on Dostoevsky’s religious ideals and their representation in his novels. The question of proportion cuts both ways, though: q.v. the New York Times Book Review’s Jan Parker, who spends at least a third of his review of Frank’s Volume III making claims like “It seems to me that Dostoevsky’s behavior does conform fully to the diagnostic criteria for pathological gambling as set forth in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual.” As much as anything, reviews like these help us appreciate Joseph Frank’s own evenhanded breadth and lack of specific axes to grind. (back to text)
19 Let’s not neglect to observe that Frank’s Volume IV provides some good personal dirt. W/r/t Dostoevsky’s hatred of Europe, for example, we learn that his famous 1867 spat with Turgenev, which was ostensibly about Turgenev’s having offended Dostoevsky’s passionate nationalism by attacking Russia in print and then moving to Germany, was also fueled by the fact that FMD had previously borrowed fifty thalers from Turgenev and promised to pay him back right away and then never did. Frank is too restrained to make the obvious point: it’s much easier to live with stiffing somebody if you can work up a grievance against him. (back to text)
20 Another bonus: Frank’s volumes are replete with marvelous and/or funny tongue-rolling names — Snitkin, Dubolyobov, Strakhov, Golubov, von Voght, Katkov, Nekrasov, Pisarev. One can see why Russian writers like Gogol and FMD made a fine art of epithetic names. (back to text)
21 Random example from her journaclass="underline" “‘Poor Feodor, he does suffer so much, and is always so irritable, and liable to fly out about trifles.… It’s of no consequence, because the other days are good, when he is so sweet and gentle. Besides, I can see that when he screams at me it is from illness, not from bad temper.’” Frank quotes and comments on long passages of this kind of stuff, but he shows little awareness that the Dostoevskys’ marriage was in certain ways quite sick, at least by 1990s standards — see e.g. “Anna’s forbearance, whatever prodigies of self-command it may have cost her, was amply compensated for (at least in her eyes) by Dostoevsky’s immense gratitude and growing sense of attachment.” (back to text)
22 Q.v. also, for instance, Dostoevsky’s disastrous passion for the bitch-goddess Appolinari Suslova, or the mental torsions he performed to justify his casino binges… or the fact, amply documented by Frank, that FMD really was an active part of the Petrashevsky Circle and as a matter of fact probably did deserve to be arrested under the laws of the time, this pace a lot of other biographers who’ve tried to claim that Dostoevsky just happened to be dragged by friends to the wrong radical meeting at the wrong time. (back to text)
23 In case it’s not obvious, “ideology” is being used here in its strict, unloaded sense to mean any organized, deeply held system of beliefs and values. Granted, by this sort of definition, Tolstoy and Hugo and Zola and most of the other nineteenth-century titans were also ideological writers. But the big thing about Dostoevsky’s gift for character and for rendering the deep conflicts within (not just between) people is that it enables him to dramatize extremely heavy, serious themes without ever being preachy or reductive, i.e., without ever blinking the difficulty of moral/spiritual conflicts or making “goodness” or “redemption” seem simpler than they really are. You need only compare the protagonists’ final conversions in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and FMD’s Crime and Punishment in order to appreciate Dostoevsky’s ability to be moral without being moralistic. (back to text)
24 Here is another subject that Frank treats brilliantly, especially in Vol. III’s chapter on House of the Dead. Part of the reason FMD abandoned the fashionable socialism of his twenties was his years of imprisonment with the absolute dregs of Russian society. In Siberia, he came to understand that the peasants and urban poor of Russia actually loathed the comfortable upper-class intellectuals who wanted to “liberate” them, and that this loathing was in fact quite justified. (If you want to get some idea of how this Dostoevskyan political irony might translate into modern US culture, try reading House of the Dead and Tom Wolfe’s “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” at the same time.) (back to text)