Lectures on Dostoevsky

255 Pages·2019·4.245 MB·English

by  Joseph Frank

Lectures on Dostoevsky
•

Lectures on
Dostoevsky
•
Joseph Frank
Edited by
Marina Brodskaya
and Marguerite Frank
Prince ton University Press
Princet on & Oxford
Copyright © 2020 by Prince ton University Press
Published by Prince ton University Press
41 William Street, Prince ton, New Jersey 08540
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press . princeton . edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brodskaya, Marina, 1957- author. | Frank, Marguerite, editor. |
Frank, Joseph, 1918-2013, author.
Title: Lectures on Dostoevsky / Marina Brodskaya, Marguerite Frank,
Joseph Frank.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019020469 | ISBN 9780691178967 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881--Criticism and
interpretation.
Classification: LCC PG3328.Z6 B685 2019 | DDC 891.73/3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020469
ISBN (e- book): 9780691189567
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
Editorial: Anne Savarese and Jenny Tan
Production Editorial: Ellen Foos
Text and Jacket Design: Leslie Flis
Production: Erin Suydam
Publicity: Jodi Price and Katie Lewis
Copyeditor: Aimee Anderson
Jacket art: Manuscript page from Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871–1872)
This book has been composed in Arno Pro
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Grateful acknowl edgment is made for permission to reprint “Joseph
Frank’s Dostoevsky” from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David
Foster Wallace. Copyright © 2005 by David Foster Wallace. Used by
permission of Little, Brown and Com pany.
Figures 1 through 4 courtesy of the family of Joseph Frank.
Contents
•
Foreword by Robin Feuer Miller vii
Preface xix
Introductory Lecture 1
Chapter 1: Poor Folk 14
Chapter 2: The Double 28
Chapter 3: The House of the Dead 45
Chapter 4: Notes from Under ground 72
Chapter 5: Crime and Punishment 100
Chapter 6: The Idiot 125
Chapter 7: The Brothers Karamazov 154
Appendix I: Selected Adaptations for Film and TV
of the Novels Covered in the Lectures 183
Appendix II: “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky”
by David Foster Wallace 187
Acknowlegments 211
Index 213
v

Foreword
•
In 2002, when Joseph Frank completed his five- volume literary
biography of Dostoevsky, he joined the ranks of such biographers
as Leon Edel (Henry James: A Life), Richard Ellmann (James
Joyce), Walter Jackson Bate, (John Keats), Janet Browne (Charles
Darwin: A Biography), not to mention James Boswell and his
Life of Johnson. In any proj ect spanning de cades, one’s view of
one’s subject changes, as does the cultural and critical climate sur-
rounding the biographer himself. Frank’s opus reflects both his
evolving take on Dostoevsky— the writer, the thinker, the
man— and his own development as a major critic of our time,
one whose early preoccupations with theory gave way to his sub-
sequent interest in creating, by the time he reached volume 5
(Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881), an almost
day- by- day account of the last de cade of Dostoevsky’s life.
Readers can even indulge in drawing parallels between the
number of pages of Frank’s biography and those of Dosto-
evsky’s novels or between the span of de cades of each as well:
there is a similarity of scale, a similarity of preoccupation with
certain big themes and ideas, as well as movement forward in
surprising new directions. Monumental biographies, such as
Frank’s Dostoevsky volumes, shape the way we understand not
only a writer and his work but the world— both the subject’s
world and our own. Frank later worked to condense his hefty
opus into a single- volume version that appeared in 2009: Dosto­
evsky: A Writer in His Time represents a fascinating distillation
of literary analy sis and cultural history.
vii
viii Foreword
But now, posthumously, a completely new distillation, in yet
another genre— the lecture—h as appeared. Lectures on Dosto­
evsky by Joseph Frank, edited by Marina Brodskaya and Margue-
rite Frank, renders an exquisite yet provocative series of Frank’s
lectures to his students at Stanford, where, astonishingly, only
after his retirement from Prince ton did he, arguably the world’s
most renowned Dostoevsky scholar, begin regularly to teach a
course on Dostoevsky from within a Slavic department. (Years
earlier, when visiting Harvard, he had offered a course on Dos-
toevsky.) The Lectures are a gift to general readers as well as to
scholars of Dostoevsky, who w ill surely find themselves ponder-
ing the contrast between Frank’s emphases in his critical writ-
ings and t hose in evidence in his lectures to students and a more
broadly based reading public.
Joseph Frank was born in 1918 on the Lower East Side of Man-
hattan, an immigrant neighborhood where many of Amer i ca’s
future intellectuals spent their childhoods. His f ather died when
he was a young child, and he was adopted by his mother’s sec-
ond husband, William Frank. Those who knew Frank will re-
member that he suffered from an occasional stammer, which
remarkably did not hamper his brilliance as a lecturer. Turning
inward as a child, he became a voracious reader and, while still
in high school, attended lectures at the New School for Social Re-
search. His parents died when he was still a young man, and nearly
penniless, he traveled to the University of Wisconsin where he
had heard that the dean was sympathetic to Jewish students seek-
ing an education. Amazingly, although he had never received
a BA, he was accepted and earned a PhD at the University of
Chicago from the famous Committee on Social Thought.
During the 1940s and beyond Frank began to publish a series
of ground- breaking essays and quickly became recognized as one
Foreword ix
of the country’s most promising literary critics and theorists. His
essay “Spatial Form in Modern Lit er a ture,” first published in 1945,
remains a classic and formed the core of his seminal book, The
Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Lit er a ture. (This
work appeared in a second edition with impor tant additions and
commentaries as The Idea of Spatial Form [1991]).
Frank wrote essays for the leading intellectual and literary
journals in the United States (such as the Sewanee Review, the
Hudson Review, the Partisan Review, and the New Republic) on
an impressive range of artists and authors— Gide, Flaubert, Mal-
raux, Mann, Goya, Cezanne, Sartre, Proust and, increasingly,
Dostoevsky.
Many readers first encountered Frank’s work on Dostoevsky
through his unforgettable essays on Notes from Under ground, The
Idiot, and The Possessed. Reading these essays could change the
way one read not only Dostoevsky but novels in general; both
the work and oneself as general reader were si mul ta neously
transformed. It turned out that reading Dostoevsky had al-
ready proved transformative for Frank as well: to the surprise
and disappointment of some, Frank put aside his role as major
theoretician and literary critic to write a literary biography of
Dostoevsky—a biography whose creation spanned the next de-
cades of his life, u ntil 2002. He spent much of his final de cade
working on the single- volume condensation of the biography
and writing essays that appeared in publications such as the
New York Review of Books. He published three impor tant collec-
tions of his essays, Through the Rus sian Prism: Essays on Lit er a­
ture and Culture (1989), Between Religion and Rationality: Essays
in Rus sian Lit er a ture and Culture (2010), and Responses to Moder­
nity: Essays in the Politics of Culture (2012).
Frank’s work exhibits a thoughtful integrity, a willingness to
follow the evidence wherever it led, even if that meant revising