![]() In 1849, Dostoevsky and his co-conspirators were interrogated by General Nabokov, the great-great-uncle of the novelist Rowan Williams’s scholarly Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction concentrated instead on the novelist’s tormented Christian messianism. Joseph Frank’s celebrated five-volume biography, published between 19, devoted more than 2,500 pages to the life of a man who was dead at the age of 59 from untreated epilepsy and a gambling addiction (also untreated). With his appetite for affliction and self-torturing asceticism, he was a casebook of neuroses. He is a difficult quarry for biographers, though. ![]() His Slavophile bias and Orthodox-heavy chauvinism endeared him to Stalin’s propagandists, who tailored his image to fit Soviet ideology. (“Dostoevsky is a third-rate writer and his fame is incomprehensible,” he judged.) For all that, Dostoevsky remains a quasi-divine figure in Russia. Its murderous antihero, Raskolnikov (from the Russian raskolnik, “dissenter”), embodies a violent ideology of redemption through suffering that Vladimir Nabokov, for one, found distasteful. Crime and Punishment, his best-known novel, radiates a dark chaos and apocalyptic sensibility. His work teems with holy fools, holy prostitutes, nihilists and revolutionaries. ![]() F or many in the west, Fyodor Dostoevsky is the most “Russian” of Russian authors. ![]()
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