Books by Joseph Frank

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 is a biography of Dostoevsky that covers the six productive years in the novelist's entire career.

Includes twenty contributions dealing with the culture that generated the great novels of Dostoevsky and the criticism of the Russian formalists of the early twentieth century, whose perceptions still shape our views of Russian and much of world literature. This title includes evaluations of books by Jakobson and Bakhtin.

Celebrates literary and cultural biography of Dostoevsky that renders the last decade of the writer's life, the years in which he wrote "A Raw Youth", "Diary of a Writer", and "The Brothers Karamazov". Describing his idiosyncratic relationship to the Russian state, this title also details Doestoevsky's rivalries with Turgenev and Tolstoy.

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, 2500-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.

In this book, acclaimed Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank explores some of the most important aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century Russian culture, literature, and history. Delving into the distinctions of the Russian novel as well as the conflicts between the religious peasant world and the educated Russian elite, Between Religion and Rationality displays the cogent reflections of one of the most distinguished and versatile critics in the field. Frank's essays provide a discriminating look at four of Dostoevsky's most famous novels, discuss the debate between J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa on the issue of Dostoevsky and evil, and confront Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism. The collection also examines such topics as Orlando Figes's sweeping survey of the history of Russian culture, the life of Pushkin, and Oblomov's influence on Samuel Beckett. Investigating the omnipresent religious theme that runs throughout Russian culture, even in the antireligious Chekhov, Frank argues that no other major European literature was as much preoccupied as the Russian with the tensions between religion and rationality. Between Religion and Rationality highlights this unique quality of Russian literature and culture, offering insights for general readers and experts alike.

This book consists of essays and reviews that address social, political, and cultural issues which arose in connection with literature broadly conceived in the wake of the First World War, and extending throughout the twentieth century.

A study of the life of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. It presents the history of nineteenth-century Russia, with Dostoevsky's mind as a refracting prism.