Lectures On Dostoevsky

Poor Folk -- The Double -- The House of the Dead -- Notes from Underground -- Crime and Punishment -- The Idiot -- The Brothers Karamazov -- Appendix I: Selected Film Adaptations of Dostoevsky's Novels -- Appendix II: "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace.

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major works Joseph Frank (1918–2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career—from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Bringing Joseph Frank’s unmatched knowledge and understanding of Dostoevsky's life and writings to a new generation of readers, this remarkable book will appeal to anyone seeking to understand Dostoevsky and his times. The book also includes Frank's favorite review of his Dostoevsky biography, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" by David Foster Wallace, originally published in the Village Voice.

A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language—and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works—from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

Flannery O'Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky shared a deep faith in Christ, which compelled them to tell stories that force readers to choose between eternal life and demonic possession. Their either-or extremism has not become more popular in the last fifty to a hundred years since these stories were first published, but it has become more relevant to a twenty-firstt-century culture in which the lukewarm middle ground seems the most comfortable place to dwell. Giving the Devil His Due walks through all of O'Connor's stories and looks closely at Dostoevsky's magnum opus The Brothers Karamazov to show that when the devil rules, all hell breaks loose. Instead of this kingdom of violence, O'Connor and Dostoevsky propose a kingdom of love, one that is only possible when the Lord again is king.

What place do Dostoevsky's works occupy in the history of the novel? To answer this question, Michael Holquist focuses on the formal aspects of Dostoevskian narrative. The author argues that the novel is a genre that constantly seeks its own identity: we still do not know what it is, since the uniqueness of its members defines the class to which it belongs. This anomaly explains the central role of the novel for Russians, perplexed as they were in the nineteenth century by idiosyncrasies that hindered development of a coherent national identity. Michael Holquist shows that the generic impulse of the novel to explore the mysteries of individual biography met and fused in Dostoevsky's works with the national quest of the Russians for an identity of their own. The paradox of the writer's achievement consists in the degree to which his meditations on the significance of being without a past are grounded in history. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This first volume of the life and work of Dostoevsky covers his early years, from boyhood to the death of his father, his brief career as a government draughtsman and his involvment with a radical group that let to his exile in Siberia. It also examines some of his earliest writings.

After more than a century, the urgency with which the writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche speaks to us is undiminished. Nietzsche explicitly acknowledged Dostoevsky’s relevance to his work, noting its affinities as well as its points of opposition. Both of them are credited with laying much of the foundation for what came to be called existentialist thought. The essays in this volume bring a fresh perspective to a relationship that illuminates a great deal of twentieth-century intellectual history. Among the questions taken up by contributors are the possibility of morality in a godless world, the function of philosophy if reason is not the highest expression of our humanity, the nature of tragedy when performed for a bourgeois audience, and the justification of suffering if it is not divinely sanctioned. Above all, these essays remind us of the supreme value of the questioning itself that pervades the work of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.

The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov. In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on 19th century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls and “The Overcoat”; Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorki’s “On the Rafts”; Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevski, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. This volume also includes Nabokov’s lectures on the art of translation, the nature of Russian censorship, and other topics. Featured throughout the volume are photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s original notes. “This volume . . . never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians.” —Anthony Burgess Introduction by Fredson Bowers