While in Germany and Italy he falls out again with Turgenev, his wife gives birth only for the child to die a short time later. Once abroad Dostoevsky falls prey to his one vice outside of resentment- roulette. They flee Russia to avoid his creditors, all the while his seizure disorder reveals itself to his bride.
ĭostoevsky hires Anna Snitnika to take dictation of what's to become The Gambler. He makes arrangements for serialization as well as complete novellas, a contracted capacity which requires an almost superhuman velocity, at which point someone suggests a stenographer. He is supporting his brother's widow and family as well as his stepson from his first marriage. He's lonely and abruptly proposes to a number of younger women. We find Dostoevsky a widowed and emotional mess. He always appears ask himself can this assertion be substantiated? I appreciate Frank as a stylist as well as a scholar. The idea that it is one fifth of a project simply inspires awe at the erudition. This is likely one of the best literary biographies I have ever encountered. Two novels of this period were thus an attempt to conjure this looming spectre of moral-social disintegration, while The Idiot offered an image of Dostoevsky's conception of the Russian Christian ideal that he hoped would take its place. His enforced exile intensified not only his love for his native land but also his abhorrence of the doctrines of Russian Nihilism-which he saw as an alien European importation infecting the Russian psyche. All the while, he worried that his recurrent epileptic attacks were impairing his literary capacities. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison.
All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels- Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils -and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career.
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