Wrestling Dostoevsky

Later this month, when Princeton University Press publishes the fifth volume of his Dostoevsky biography, Joseph Frank will be in France with his wife. The man has earned his vacation. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 brings to its conclusion a project that has occupied Mr. Frank for nearly half a century. Beginning with the first volume, in 1976, reviewers have habitually used the words "authoritative" and "definitive" to describe his reconstruction of the novelist's turbulent life, which he situates in the context of 19th-century Russian and European intellectual history. With the final installment now complete, the expression "masterpiece" seems more or less inevitable.

A hardbound copy of the book dominates the coffee table in the hotel room where the Franks are staying on their way to Europe for the summer. They are in transit from Stanford University, where Mr. Frank is a professor emeritus of comparative literature and of Slavic languages and literature. The coffee table also holds scholarly works on Henry James and Alexis de Tocqueville, and a novel by Martin Amis -- as well as two copies of Summer in Baden-Baden, by Leonid Tsypkin, a novel about Dostoevsky. Mr. Frank mentions that his essay on it will appear soon in The New York Review of Books; he has just been correcting galleys of his piece. "Now that the biography is done," he says, "I'm ready to do some reviewing."

In an era when academic life is dominated by the search for the Hot Young Professor, Mr. Frank, at 83, qualifies as an éminence grise. But for a grand old man of literary scholarship, he has a manner faintly resembling that of an old-fashioned newspaperman, the sort who would mock the term "journalist" as pretentious. And indeed, it turns out that Mr. Frank spent his 20s as a labor reporter, publishing essays on modernist literature and aesthetic theory in his spare time. "I always thought of myself primarily as a writer," he says.

The earlier volumes of Mr. Frank's biography received awards from the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle, among many others. More impressive still, they won acclaim from Dostoevsky scholars (who, like the novelist's characters, are a contentious lot). But his previous triumphs did not make the last volume any easier to complete. The final phase of Dostoevsky's life made some harsh demands on Mr. Frank as both a scholar and a human being -- for in his last decade, the novelist published both literary masterpieces and virulent anti-Semitic screeds.

"I felt a certain resistance to the material," says Mr. Frank, who is Jewish. "I admired him so much otherwise. There are many things in Dostoevsky that are hard to pin down. He'll say things that are awful on one page, then the exact opposite on the next. Which one is the real Dostoevsky?" In an early phase of his work, Mr. Frank says, he was inclined to minimize the importance of the more vicious passages in Diary of a Writer (an influential journal of cultural and political commentary, written entirely by the novelist). Even now, Mr. Frank seems reluctant to discuss his confrontation with Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism, except to say that it was "emotionally wearing and trying."

Caryl Emerson, a professor of Russian and comparative literature at Princeton University (where Mr. Frank also holds the title of professor emeritus of comp lit), read the new book in manuscript. She sees it as a departure for Mr. Frank. "Dostoevsky is one of the great, wild writers. And in the earlier volumes, Joe, with his extraordinary grounding in European thought and literature, was prone to making him sound a little more civilized than he really was," she says, laughing. With the final book, she says, "the picture of Dostoevsky is of a rounder, more compromised personality." She singles out for praise Mr. Frank's analysis of The Brothers Karamazov, calling it "a remarkably full portrait of how the novel grew out of the man."

Mr. Frank has very little interest in psychologizing. Some years ago, he published an essay on Sigmund Freud's famous case study "Dostoevsky and Parricide," which diagnosed the novelist's neuroses as manifesting masochism with repressed homosexual tendencies (the product of guilt about murderous feelings toward his father). Mr. Frank showed that Freud's theory rested upon a number of speculations (and outright mistakes) about the novelist's life. The Oedipus complex, however interesting as a theory, was not much help in illuminating what Mr. Frank called "the enigma of Dostoevsky."

While Mr. Frank by no means reduces the great author to a troubled mind with a knack for storytelling, in completing his magnum opus he portrays Dostoevsky -- hailed by his contemporaries as a spiritual leader, yet consumed by the ferocity of his own hatreds -- as one of the darkest figures in world literature.

"This time," says Ms. Emerson, "I think that Joe was willing to put in more despair."

A Raw Youth

In examining Mr. Frank's own biography, it becomes clear that he is a literary scholar by temperament, and an academic by afterthought. In high school, he won a national prize for an essay modestly offering "A Prolegomena to All Future Literary Criticism." While still a teenager, he published reviews of what he describes as "several books of poetry and some very inferior novels" in the New Masses, a Communist cultural magazine. "I was never a party liner of any kind, though," he recalls. He made his public farewell to Marxist theory in 1941, with an essay for The Southern Review, a prominent literary journal. He was 23.

The following year, Mr. Frank took a job as a labor reporter for the Bureau of National Affairs, a public-affairs publisher in Washington, D.C. "There was a very lively international community in Washington during the war," he says. "It was an intellectually stimulating place to be."

He became friends with Alan Tate, the writer and critic who, as editor of The Sewanee Review, published Mr. Frank's "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" in 1945. More than a half-century later, it remains a standard reference in discussions of modernist aesthetics. Showing an intimate familiarity with literary and philosophical writings in several languages, the essay would have been impressive enough -- even if Mr. Frank had not been a man in his mid-20s who had neglected to finish his bachelor's degree.

In the essay, Mr. Frank argued that there was a common element in the avant-garde writing of T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, and Djuna Barnes (among others). Their use of fragmentation, allusion, and exceptionally dense language presents the reader with the challenge of understanding how a given poem or novel holds together: "The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relationship to each other when read consecutively in time," he wrote. The inner structure of a modernist work (even of a novel) was not narrative; its elements were related to one another according to a "spatial logic" in which time "has become a continuum in which distinctions between past and present are wiped out."

In effect, then, the elements of a modernist text worked together more like the parts of a sculpture or a work of architecture than the movements of a symphony. It was a bold theory -- and it provoked much debate over the years, not only in the United States.

On the strength of his publications in literary quarterlies, Mr. Frank was invited to attend the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University in the late 1940s. He left the Bureau of National Affairs in 1950, after receiving a Fulbright scholarship to work in France on a book about Flaubert. When his grant ran out, Mr. Frank supported himself for a year by doing what he calls "some investigative journalism" for the U.S. Embassy. (At the height of the cold war, an American intellectual who could read several languages needed never stay unemployed for long.) And his attention drifted from Madame Bovary to a young French mathematician named Marguerite J. Straus. They were married in 1953. She later joined the circle of mathematicians at Princeton made famous by John Nash. The Frank-Wolfe algorithm is highly respected in the field of game theory, if relatively little known in Hollywood.

His Fulbright -- combined with later fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Chicago -- "helped make me academically respectable," Mr. Frank says. But even as he made belated and anomalous progress through higher education (skipping directly to his Ph.D., from the University of Chicago, in 1960), formative influences on his work still came from outside academe. When invited to give the Gauss seminar, in 1954, Mr. Frank chose a topic that had first attracted his interest while in Paris: "Existentialist Themes in Modern Literature." Mr. Frank had already published some essays on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in literary magazines. And as he prepared his lectures, it was inevitable that he would reread "Notes From Underground" -- for the ideas expressed by Dostoevsky's bitter, tormented narrator still echoed in the cafes of the Left Bank.

"What happened," says Mr. Frank now, "is that I got more and more interested in Dostoevsky and less and less interested in existentialism." He began to study the cultural context of the novels, and taught himself to read Russian. By the 1960s, Mr. Frank had drafted a book on Dostoevsky's fiction -- a critical study, not a biography. But when he submitted the manuscript to Oxford University Press, it received a negative reader's report. He quotes one line from memory; it sounds, in retrospect, ironic. "I don't see how Mr. Frank can write so many pages about Dostoevsky without saying anything about his life."

The Reluctant Biographer

The project grew. Mr. Frank immersed himself in the novelist's work, as well as historical scholarship on Russian society and culture. His understanding of Dostoevsky's era was further shaped by discussions with friends in Paris. Among them were members of a circle around Boris Souvarine -- a Russian émigré who, during the early 1920s, had been a leading figure in the Communist International, until breaking with Stalin. They treated the debates of 19th-century intellectuals as matters of more than purely historical interest. "It was always very stimulating," Mr. Frank says. "They were very interested in how the social and political issues of Dostoevsky's time were related to what was going on in the contemporary world."

When The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849 appeared, in 1976, Mr. Frank already expected his project to fill four volumes. But he was still reluctant to call it a biography. "I do not go from the life to the work," he wrote, "but the other way around." Maintaining a dispassionately cerebral stance toward Dostoevsky is difficult, however, for the author's career was lush with melodramatic detail, including mystical experiences, the financial agony wrought by compulsive gambling, and a fairly untidy romantic life. Nonetheless, by 1986 -- when the third of what was then projected as five volumes appeared -- it seemed that Mr. Frank was managing something quite improbable. While focusing on what he called "the social-cultural and literary context directly linked with creative production," Mr. Frank was revealing a figure markedly different from the Dostoevsky known to anyone but experts.

The usual thumbnail sketch treats Dostoevsky's life as the transformation of a young iconoclast with romantic delusions about "the masses" into a hard-bitten conservative. The turning point came in 1849. That was when Dostoevsky was arrested along with a few dozen other literati who had gathered on Friday nights to discuss socialism, atheism, and similarly advanced notions. A military court condemned 15 members of the circle, including Dostoevsky, to death.

They were placed in front of a firing squad, the drums rolled, and the commanding officer gave a signal -- when, suddenly, a messenger arrived with a reprieve. (The "miraculous" event had been carefully staged, on orders from the czar.) The prisoners were sent to Siberia. Five years of hard labor alongside thieves, rapists, and murderers cured Dostoevsky of any belief in human goodness. He embraced Russian Orthodoxy and left Siberia a bitter reactionary who loved Jesus Christ and the czar, and hated pretty much everybody else.

So goes the familiar story. Mr. Frank's portrait is more nuanced. The circle of intellectuals to which the young Dostoevsky belonged is often portrayed as an ineffectual bunch of rhetorical revolutionaries, more interested in arguing about Hegel than making bombs. Even a report by a government spy suggested that the group was essentially harmless, making the mock execution appear that much more sadistic. But Mr. Frank shows that Dostoevsky belonged to a smaller group that had grown weary of talk and was preparing to take action. (The leader of that faction may have been the original model for Stavrogin, the horrific revolutionary leader in The Possessed.) And to complicate the picture even more, Mr. Frank argues that Dostoevsky had been an Orthodox believer even as a young radical. His early socialist novels were not acts of rebellion against his Christian upbringing but, rather, manifestations of his faith.

Mr. Frank sees the novelist's later political beliefs not as a misanthropic response to imprisonment with the dregs of society but as the exact opposite: "Dostoevsky's faith in the innately Christian virtues of the Russian peasantry, which he felt he could discern even under the repellent exteriors of hardened peasant criminals," he writes, "became a crucial, if highly questionable, cornerstone of his later ideology." Dostoevsky's ire was reserved for the intelligentsia, which he thought could not appreciate the masses' simple reverence for their czar.

Reading Between the Lines

Mr. Frank drew on critical and historical sources in a number of languages, but he says that one body of research in particular played a crucial role in his understanding of the novelist: the work of Russian editors who, during the Soviet era, worked under difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances. Under Communism, Dostoevsky scholarship was tolerated but not encouraged. Given his later czarist politics and religious fervor, he was fit for denunciation, not careful interpretation. Yet the author's undeniable importance as a figure in Russian literature meant that a few scholars could work on editions of his texts.

On his trips to Paris, Mr. Frank says, he would seek out copies of the Soviet editions. "You could sense from reading the footnotes that the editors had reached conclusions about Dostoevsky they weren't able to state because of censorship," he says. Part of his work involved drawing out the implications hidden between the lines -- in effect, finishing the portrait that Soviet scholars could visualize but not paint. "If they'd been able to do it," he adds, "I wouldn't have needed to."

Reviewing the first volume for The New Yorker, George Steiner noted that Mr. Frank's biography was "very much the work of a professional's professional, addressing himself to his peers in the West and the Soviet Union as much as to the general reader." But in reviews for professional journals, Mr. Frank's peers have sometimes complained that his prose was, on the contrary, just a little too friendly to the nonspecialist. In other words, not enough footnotes. (The reader interested in Dostoevsky himself may consider that admirable, but it does present certain problems in determining whether Mr. Frank is aware that X refuted Y's argument about Z's documentary evidence.)

In the Slavic Review, one critic described Mr. Frank's Russian translations as "generally rather stilted and stodgy" -- and complained that he had not even given the date of Dostoevsky's mother's death. But the same reviewer praised Mr. Frank for providing the best survey in any language of the author's life and times.

That judgment has been echoed in most professional discussions of the biography. In the Bulletin of the International Dostoevsky Society, a German reviewer called Mr. Frank's work "unparalleled a veritable encyclopedia of Dostoevsky scholarship."

Beneath the Underground Man

The heart of Mr. Frank's work, by his own account, is Dostoevsky's fiction. And there is a clear consensus on his critical approach: Mr. Frank's treatment of the novels displays what one reviewer termed "a traditionalistic bias." He avoids interpretations influenced by more recent work in critical theory; rather, his reading of the fiction is guided primarily by his understanding of the author's intention, and fortified by an impressive knowledge of comparative literary history.

Some Dostoevsky experts have suggested that Mr. Frank thereby deprives himself of interesting insights into the novelist's work. But many see his resolutely arrière-garde critical approach as the biography's great strength: a gold standard. As Princeton's Ms. Emerson points out, Dostoevsky has attracted more than his share of extremely passionate (and sometimes far-fetched) interpretations. "With Joe's books," she says, "you find fewer intrusive and whimsical readings of the novels than you might from other critics."

A case in point is his treatment of "Notes From Underground." The novella's brooding narrator -- a tightly wound knot of resentment, obsessed with proving his own freedom, yet compulsively acting out his own self-loathing -- invites no end of psychoanalytic and metaphysical speculation.

But Mr. Frank's approach reflects his close attention to the enormous body of journalism that Dostoevsky published in magazines and newspapers, showing how closely the novelist tracked contemporary philosophical arguments. Mr. Frank argues that the "Underground Man" -- usually understood to be denouncing belief in determinism and progress -- is actually a prisoner of such doctrines; his irrational spite reflects the psychological damage wrought by rationalist ideology. "No other writer equals Dostoevsky," writes Mr. Frank, "in his ability to portray this relation between ideas and their effects on the human personality."

In chronicling the author's early years, Mr. Frank included accounts of several minor works that critics had seldom discussed. But the last two volumes cover Dostoevsky's "great period" -- the awe-inspiring flood of major works he published in rapid succession after 1865, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. The leading characters often embody the belief that God is dead, and live out the consequences of their efforts to assume His place. Opponents of Dostoevsky, then and now, have often considered his treatment of the Russian intelligentsia to be slanderous. By examining Dostoevsky's role in arguing about "the new ideas" in the Russian press during the 1860s and '70s, Mr. Frank places his major novels in their contemporary context. And he suggests that, however vigorously Dostoevsky may have exercised his artistic license, the characters in the novels were recognizable facsimiles of reality.

Dear Fyodor

In the final decade of Dostoevsky's life, he began to emerge not merely as one novelist among several in Russian literature, but rather as something like a national sage -- thanks largely to Diary of a Writer, his one-man magazine. Readers from all over Russia wrote him with their questions about philosophy, politics, literature, and their private lives. As Mr. Frank notes, the flow of essays and sketches in the monthly journal assumed a more intimate tone than anything the novelist had published before; the great author was in dialogue with his public in the most direct possible way.

"In writing each volume," Mr. Frank says of his biography, "I had a sort of crisis at some point, trying to figure out how to organize the material. This time, the trouble came from dealing with the Diary." His work on Dostoevsky's personal journalism proved to be a kind of time bomb. Mr. Frank had completed the book and submitted it to Princeton University Press, which had announced a publication date. And then Mr. Frank withdrew the manuscript.

"My wife read the chapters on the Diary and said, well, this isn't very good. All I had done was give a running summary of what Dostoevsky wrote in the magazine. I reread the manuscript and saw she was absolutely right. I couldn't face myself in the mirror without reworking those chapters," he says. It took about five months to revise the manuscript, transforming his month-by-month synopsis of the Diary into a thematic analysis of its contents. Publication was delayed a year.

The work was particularly grueling because of the Diary's wildly inconsistent but generally hateful attitude toward Russian Jews. Dostoevsky was capable of penning an encomium to the Christian spirit of universal brotherhood and making vicious remarks about "the kikes" a few pages later.

"Then Dostoevsky will write something like that sketch [in the Diary] of a Christian doctor attending the birth of a baby in the home of a poor Jewish family that is just beautiful," Mr. Frank says.

A Vision Transformed

Listening to the biographer discuss his struggle with the final volume, I think of the work of Elliott Jaques, a psychoanalytic theorist who writes about the effect of aging on creativity. Mr. Jaques argues that, for writers and artists who do not burn out or get stuck in a rut, the later years can bring a deep transformation in the quality of their vision. They develop the power to recognize the "hate and destructive forces" in the human psyche -- confronting "the death drive" (as Freud called it) in a way that renders their creative work more complex.

To complete the research project that had occupied him for almost five decades, it seems, Mr. Frank had to immerse himself -- one last time -- in the pages where Dostoevsky expressed the "hate and destructive forces" shaping his own view of the world.

Armchair psychoanalysis aside, one wonders what it feels like to complete an epic of scholarship. Elation? Depression?

"Neither," says Mr. Frank. "I wonder sometimes how I am going to occupy my time now. With the other volumes, when I was done, I never had to wonder what I'd be doing next."

His wife, Marguerite, to whom the first and last volumes of Dostoevsky are dedicated, suggests that he write some personal essays about his early career -- sound advice from someone he calls his best editor.

After all, Mr. Frank's circle of friends included John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saint-John Perse, Irving Howe, and R.P. Blackmur. He has fond memories of Ralph Ellison, who encouraged Mr. Frank's work by giving him his own copy of a book of essays by Dostoevsky.

"Right now," he says, "I want to finish an article about Jane Austen and the French Revolution. I've been thinking about it for years."

"But I want to publish it someplace besides a scholarly journal, someplace where they'll pay me," he adds. "I'm an old journalist, after all."