Biography
Fits of Passion
'Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881' by Joseph Frank

 

 

Reviewed by Robert L. Belknap
Sunday, June 16, 2002; Page BW04

DOSTOEVSKY
The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881
By Joseph Frank
Princeton Univ. 784 pp. $35

The fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's study of Dostoyevsky marks the end of a period in the growing up of American thought. Frank has had a place among our major intellectual historians since 1945, when the Sewanee Review published his "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," a landmark in modernism's transition from a subject of manifestos to an object of serious scholarly intellection. The article became the first chapter of Frank's 1963 book The Widening Gyre, which remains indispensable to the understanding of modernism. In his foreword to that book, Allen Tate wrote, "Mr. Frank is not a New Critic. . . . He is a philosophical critic with an international point of view; and he is his own man. I take it that he is the most original critical mind to appear in America since the Second World War."

I have never dealt closely with Frank but have known and admired him for years. He is not the kind of scholar who says the same thing in book after book. Having made his contribution to our understanding of modernism, he turned to the study of an earlier philosophical figure with an international point of view who also was most emphatically his own man: Feodor Dostoyevsky.

At roughly the same time as modernism studies, Dostoyevsky scholarship was emerging from a world of simplicities. Dostoyevsky's friends and foes in Russia had treated him in terms of religious and political absolutes, and his admirers in the West at first had regarded him as a mighty Scythian, wholly alien to Europe, writing novels that were loose and baggy monsters, lacking the control that Western civilization would have offered.

In the years between the wars, André Gide and others introduced the West to a contrasting idea -- that Dostoyevsky was a literary craftsman -- and the finest Slavic scholars were exploring the depth and breadth of his literary and philosophical debt to Schiller, Balzac, Dickens and Hegel. But it was going to take an almost unimaginable exploit of erudition and synthesis to make a coherent picture of the interaction between Dostoyevsky's writings and those of the thinkers, journalists and creative artists around him and further afield. Frank undertook this effort.

The Russians coined the word dostoevshchina to name the complex of hysterical, scandalous, morbid and melodramatic features that initially drew their imagination into a world of self-consciousness and suffering. Frank set himself the task of understanding Dostoyevsky in the intellectual world of the 19th century, where French, German and English thought predominated, and Russians twisted and adapted their heritage to fit their huge, bureaucratized, corrupt and widely illiterate empire. Frank has moved Dostoyevsky from the world of dostoevshchina into this intellectual combat, where he played and continues to play such a crucial role. An aristocratic aesthete like Nabokov despised Dostoyevsky as a melodramatic journalist. Frank carries us through the process by which Dostoyevsky surpassed Dickens and Balzac at turning journalistic style and issues into overwhelming art. •

Robert L. Belknap, who has written two books about "The Brothers Karamazov," is professor emeritus of Russian at Columbia University