Not with its doctrines, which remained incredible to most of them, but with its morality, which they believed pointed to social justice for the least of their countryfolk.ĭostoevsky, however, was certain that trying to maintain Christian morality without Christian doctrine-the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the redemptive sacrifice of Christ-would lead to disaster. The new, still Left-leaning Populists of the 1870’s, many of them sobered by the numerous assassinations that seemed a prologue to bloody revolution on the French scale, had in effect made peace with Christianity. The Left-radicals of the 1860’s had been aggressively atheistic. He discovered a subtle but important change in the Russian mental climate. In 1871 Dostoevsky returned from Europe, where he had gone in 1867 to escape from creditors.
The novels he began to write in the 1860’s, after this enforced ten-year hiatus, reflected his personal experiences but reverberated, too, with the ideological conflicts of his time. Seeing his life all but snuffed out and then given back to him, or living intimately in prison with peasant murderers and thieves who were nonetheless godly in ways upper- and middle-class people back in Moscow and Petersburg were not, deepened Dostoevsky’s Christianity and made him abjure forever the Utopian radicalism of his youth. In the late 1840’s, after his first novel Poor Folk had made him the darling of Utopian revolutionaries who wanted to free the serfs and reorganize Russia along communalist lines, he was arrested as a conspirator, put in front of a firing-squad for what, in hideous jest, turned out to be a mock execution, and sent to Siberia for four years of hard labor, followed by six years as a grunt in the army. Dostoevsky had grown up socially less elevated and spiritually more orthodox than his rivals Turgenev and Tolstoy.
Like Edmund Wilson in an earlier generation, Frank taught himself Russian, learned practically everything there was to know about the culture of Dostoevsky’s era (1821-81), read everything the novelist ever wrote, and set himself the formidable task of telling a largely non-Slavist, Anglophonic readership what he found.įrank helpfully opens this final volume with a reprise of the first four. In 1976, when he was a fifty-eight-year-old Princeton professor of comparative literature, Joseph Frank brought out the first volume of what has become a magisterial life of Fyodor Dostoevsky at eighty-four, he has now published the fifth and last volume. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881
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