Joseph Frank (1) (1918–2013)

Though the event is not actually depicted or described in Seeds of Revolt, the specter of Russian uber-novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky's arrest, mock execution and sentence to Siberia looms large over this first of Joseph Frank's five-volume biography of the man. This should not be a spoiler for anyone; this fact and its timing (1849) are quite possibly the best-known and most-talked-about biographical detail in all Dostoevskiana, mentioned in every introduction, foreword, sketch and essay I've show more ever seen about the man. I might say it's as impossible not to know Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia as it is not to know that he wrote The Brothers Karamozov and Crime and Punishment, but then I run the risk of wandering into bless-me-what-do-they-teach-at-these-schools-ism.

What is not generally known to the casual Dostoevsky fan (which is what I would call myself; I certainly could not hold forth with Michael at Pink's for any length of time*) is the details of why and how this pivotal event came to happen. Enter the redoubtable Joseph Frank, whose staggering work I learned of, as is probably the case with everyone in my cliques and circles, through an essay by the late and much-lamented David Foster Wallace.** And before you ask, yes, I plan to read the other four volumes, for having completed this one I find myself a much less casual Dostoevsky fan and a Frank fan as well.

Frank could definitely go toe-to-toe with Michael at Pink's, and wouldn't even have to serve up a hot dog to keep the ordinary punter's attention while he did so.

As I said, the arrest looms large over this account, ominous and always feeling just around the corner even as Doestoevsky grows up with his strict father, suffers through military school, attracts the praise and attention of the great critic Vissarion Belinsky with his first novel Poor Folk (which I have yet to read but now very much want to) and then falls out with him, takes up other, nicer friends and watches them move away, writes, writes and writes and always wrings his hands over the plight of the enslaved peasantry of Russia (among whom he had had mostly happy formative experiences as a boy on his family's little estate) -- and then meets Petrashevsky, he of the circle accused of subversion and revolution and all sorts of other things that autocratic regimes do not like.

Frank's painstaking examination of the Petrashevsky circle -- a very informal salon in which members of the intelligentsia gathered of a Friday night to talk Socialist ideas, religion, politics and, occasionally, literature -- frankly gave me the chills, not so much because of what happened to them per se, or how they conducted themselves or what they talked about as what they resembled: they resembled Twitter, if not the entire internet. Everybody got a chance to spout off or argue, there was rarely a set agenda, anyone who wanted to could participate (within limits, of course, the physical and temporal ones of St. Petersburg of the 1840s. Of course.), anyone could get sucked in and, potentially (and later actually), everyone could become tarred with the same brush. So when some members started up a secret society with the aim of actually staging a revolution in Russia, everybody got busted.

Back then, of course, the government had to work hard at it, to infiltrate the circle with an actual person hanging out at actual gatherings at specific times; nowadays, we've turned everything inside-out, having our conversations in full public view, asynchronously, trusting the First Amendment and the odd pseudonymous identity and that those in power won't confuse rhetoric with intent. This may be very foolish of us. Especially as things like NDAA have been allowed to happen. I do not fear being mock-shot or sent to Siberia, but I do fear an internet fettered and stunted by corporate/government interests, or being cut off from it and thus my world. I fear falling into the prison of my own flesh.***

Such are the dark thoughts a good Dostoevsky biography can inspire. And this one is very, very good. And, as I said, I'm itching to get my hands on the other four volumes.

And I'll be sleeping with one eye open, and tweeting with a little more concern (though I'm sure I already damned myself long ago out of my own typing fingers. I've always been free with my opinions, and have paid the price for this before when they were misconstrued, misunderstood, or just unpopular). Dostoevsky was not a revolutionary or even much of a socialist, Frank says, but if you got him going defending literature that wasn't written purely as a dialectical tool for social reform, or, worse, on the plight of the peasantry, then he could potentially wind up out in the streets screaming and waving a red flag. As a friend of mine once observed, some people have buttons to push, others have a whole keyboard. Unca Fyodor had perhaps a modestly sized keyboard; mine is vast and varied).

But what of it, Orson Welles might ask. Go on singing.

*Wink wink at Unca Harlan Ellison, the modern writer of whom I was most reminded as I read this biography of Unca Fyodor. Go get your hands on a copy of Angry Candy, far and away my favorite of his short story collections and the one containing the amusing and awesome "Prince Myshkin and Hold the Relish."

**Which appears in his last essay collection Consider the Lobster, if you're wondering. I could not find a link to the complete text online. The book is worth acquiring or at least reading, though, and not just for the Frank/Dostoevsky piece!

***Wink wink at William Gibson. Of course. show less

How could this be anything other than extraordinary?

This is perhaps one of the best biographies ever. Illuminating on so many levels. I learned so much, even about novels that I have read multiple times - such is the depth of both the biographer's knowledge, as well as Dostoevsky's nuanced and astonishing works. Frank also explores the culture and political background of Russia, providing much needed context. I could go on for paragraphs.

Emphatically recommended for all.

This is an almost perfect book: Frank combines fascinating history, insightful biography and above average literary criticism perfectly. I'm literally speechless; the only book I can think of to put beside this is MacDiarmid's 'Christianity: the first three thousand years,' which is similarly clear, stimulating, beautifully written and finely structured.
Aside from giving us a model for literary biographies, Frank also manages (possibly without knowing it) to write a perfect guidebook for show more writing novels: combine a deep fascination with your own time, an interest in human psychology, deep moral convictions, and a concern for the Big Ideas of human life in general. Then work your butt off. I'd like to think someone out there has managed to do that without being quite the twat that Dostoevsky became (yes- Russia (and by 'Russia' he of course means 'Orthodox peasants') will save the world). But I have no evidence of that as yet. If you like Dostoevsky's novels at all, this is well worth the effort.

Fun things that Dostoevsky said:

"You feel that one must have perpetual spiritual resistance and negation so as not to surrender, not to submit to the impression, not to bow before the fact and deify Baal, that is, not to accept the existing as one's own ideal." (376)

"The people are always the people.... but here you no longer see a people, but the systematic, submissive and induced lack of consciousness." (378)

"It is necessary to assume as author someone omniscient and faultless, who holds up to the view of all one of hte members of hte new generation." (480)

"'it is not worth doing good int eh world, for it is said, it will be destroyed.' There's something foolhardy and dishonest in this idea. Most of all, it's a very convenient idea for ordinary behavior: since everything is doomed, why exert oneself, why love to do good? Live for your paunch." (843) show less

The adventures of D. up to the age of 28 – that is, up to his arrest.

The family weren’t well off. For a start in life his father sent him to a military academy, hideous for our young artist. There, at least, he got to exercise his independent mind, his courage and his empathy for the unfortunate. The last, such a facet of his work, is very evident, very young, as simply a trait of his. And he has the guts – while an outsider himself – to get in the way, however he can, of violence at show more the school, physical maltreatment of junior students - of janitors - and of German teachers. Independence: not only does he take stands, but he’s unafraid to go against fashions, from the earliest age and even where his heart is, in the written arts. He’s persistently loyal to a father who has the fevered temperament poor D. must have gotten from him. Both were hard to live with. D. knows this about himself and apologises often to his brother for his behaviour: ‘I have a terrible defect… Otherwise I am disgusting… ’

Frank accounts for why the issue of serfdom set him frothing at the mouth; he couldn’t discuss serfdom without getting over-excited. It began simply with incidents – he was a casual witness of cruelty – a sight daily seen on the streets touched him where he lived. Then his father was murdered by his serfs… or maybe he wasn’t, but they believed so. D. managed to blame himself, for his cash demands on his dad in spite of the financial ruin of the estate. He knew the serfs weren’t murderers, unless pushed by the intolerable. He knew his dad was a bit of a loop and as a widower had gone to drink. D. ended up with a free-the-serfs agenda that took over his life – quite truly, when he stepped from liberal circles into revolutionary conspiracy.

He signed up to overthrow the government. It wasn’t a mere case of leaflets. Later he told us the investigation missed an inner cell, of which he was a member (if not, I assume, he wouldn’t have escaped that firing squad). It’s exactly like his novel Demons – and as exciting to read.

But before his deep political involvement he made a literary splash: and this is a cautionary tale. The splash was of the noisiest, and shortly after he sinks like a stone, savagely mauled by the literary lions he thought he had eating out of his hand. Frank takes him to task for his vainglory while the instant fame lasted; but this is too stern a test at 24 – or at any age for any writer.

Frank explains the originality of Poor Folk. D. uses the novel of letters, territory of high sentiment and exclusively, beforehand, aristocratic characters; but his affairs of the heart concern a shabby clerk – target of satire in Russian fiction – who isn’t even young and handsome, and a girl in the slums. No-one had done this. No-one had taken lowly inhabitants of St Petersburg and given them the fine and subtle sentiments of a Clarissa (without a cultural knowledge beyond them: the clerk has awful judgement in fiction – but his own life and heart are far above that fiction). D. drives the point home with stray mentions from the epistolary novel - a Lovelace here and a Teresa there. No-one in Russia had even written of such people from the inside – Gogol couldn’t shake the sarcasm and the view from an upper level - although George Sand was going great guns in France with poor and noble heroes. She wasn’t as clever, though.

The writers most important for him were Balzac and Victor Hugo; Schiller of course, who looms so in his last novel; and he was always devoted to Pushkin. George Sand was between your toes in Russia, at the forefront of the novelistic arm of French Utopian Socialism. Here we get to the great tug of war between two socialisms. The major critic of these years, Belinsky, couldn’t make up his mind and hopped from one to the other. But D. by his whole temperament was in the French Utopian camp, and I don’t believe he ever left. The Left left him – the tug of war was being won, even in these years, by the other style of socialism, rational, material and divorced from religion.

D. was religious as a child and they teased him for a monk in school. But we need to understand his religion against Utopian Socialism, which thought of itself as the True Christianity, at last, and of Christ as the original revolutionary. Florid sentiments, compassion as the Christ-like trait - quite the loveliest lefties on earth. Not that this contented D. He began to add that element of the human psyche, here, there and everywhere: the knowledge of human irrationality, which Frank attributes to his own unsettling mental experiences; human refusal to be reduced to one’s circumstances; self-exacerbation of those circumstances – so that society isn’t alone to be blamed. He quickly went beyond protest literature.

In a famous scene in Poor Folk, a handshake matters more to the clerk than a hand-out – the sense of equality, treatment with human dignity, are worth no end of dinners to him. A socialism about material circumstances – feed them and they’re happy – he’d find terribly insulting, however hungry he may be. Belinsky, converted to the other socialism, says, “It has been proved that a man feels and thinks and acts invariably according to the law of egoistical urges, and indeed, he cannot have any others.” Scientific, material determinism, a strictly physiological concept of the mind, rational solutions to our ills – and to boot, a utilitarian function for art. This was terrible to Dostoyevsky and is the start of his great falling-out with the Left.

Much of his biography book one explores these two socialisms – the old he was in sympathy with, the new with which he’ll be at loggerheads. I cannot but be struck by the fact that we too are in the grip of a scientific determinism, where free will is a fiction of the user of our software brains, to let us go about our lives without despair. Dostoyevsky spent his life in just such a fight. If you feel embattled, you can visit him. show less