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plains that "Dostoevsky" for him means basically "the work," the
body of texts that carries that name . Frank's first concern is with the
work , and he moves from there to the "relevant" events in the life,
and from there to the major historical currents of which they were a
part.
He is far too sophisticated a scholar not to be aware of the tradi–
tional pitfalls of the biographical fallacy, and he is reasonably wary,
"sensible," about them. Perhaps common sense is too much his base.
It
sports oddly with a life like Dostoevsky's .
There are other pitfalls as well. For instance, no one has yet
written a persuasive nonpartisan synthetic history of Russia for, say,
the period that encompasses Dostoevsky's life and a little beyond , of
a kind that is not uncommon for most of the countries of Western
Europe. The crisis-chronotope seems there, too, to suggest itself,
where events belie a gradual, logical unfolding through time, of
some hidden but latent inner essence . Crises, with their accompany–
ing emergent sense of the need for radical alternatives, may provoke
not only desperate imaginative projections into the future , but also
intense memory-searches of the distant past, both of which may
seem to offer more than a sensible scrutiny of immediate contingen–
cies . They emphasize break, rupture, rather than continuity. This,
too , no doubt, has its logic ; but it is not the logic of common sense.
Bakhtin links Dostoevsky with Lucian and Apuleius, whom Dos–
toevsky mayor may not have read, yet the trace of origins is strikingly
there . Frank sticks to "the record," and is much better at explaining
Dostoevsky's relationship to the Westerners and Slavophiles , to
Belinsky and Balzac and Lamennais, Feuerbach and Carl Gustav
Carus, than he is to St. Dmitry of Rostov , or for that matter, to
Shakespeare whose presence in Dostoevsky's life (mentioned several
times) remains unaccountable .
At least to some degree, and by an instinct that speaks well for
him , Frank abandons a concern for continuity and balance, the logic
of development, in favor of concentration on the great crises and
reversals in Dostoevsky's life.
In
the first volume, he seemed to
devote a disproportionate amount of space to correcting Freud's
famous essay, "Dostoevsky and Parricide." Freud's essay, though
negligible in the context of Freud's own work, has had a considerable
influence on Dostoevsky scholarship. What matters, as Frank points
out , is not whether or not Dostoevsky's father was in fact murdered
by his peasants - it seems he died of apoplexy after all, but Dostoev–
sky believed nevertheless that he was murdered - bu t the precise
