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PARTISAN REVIEW
nature of the guilt that event inspired in him. This has bearing on
the ideological crisis later described in Volume Two at the time of
Dostoevsky's
katorga,
and the transformed roles of peasantry and tsar
in Dostoevsky's new set of commitments. In any case, the circum–
stances surrounding the death of Dostoevsky's father were worth the
exploration-time Frank afforded them. Unfortunately, he devotes no
corresponding time to the previous death of Dostoevsky's mother.
The "record" is lacking, and he does not like to speculate .
Apart from the contretemps with Freud's essay, the first
volume concentrates on Dostoevsky's astonishing public success with
his first novel, his subsequent almost equally astonishing failures, his
relationship to the Belinsky circle and to the Petrashevtsy. Frank is
very good at describing the secularized religious atmosphere, the
humanist-sentimental atmosphere of the Westernizing liberal-social–
ist circles of the 1840s, the differences within those circles, and their
relationship to the Slavophiles on the one hand, and to the "nihilist"
generation of the 1860s on the other. The great dramatic event of
this period in Dostoevsky's life, his arrest, trial, mock-execution and
exile to hard labor and Siberia, is amply there, but Frank tends to
tone it down, and nothing much new is revealed.
The second volume, which covers the 1850s, poses a special
problem for Frank.
It
is a period in which Dostoevsky wrote very lit–
tle - two short, minor fictions toward the end of the period, two dis–
tinctly potboiler poems, and a few letters. Thus, it is difficult to
move from the work to the life, unless one resorts to works produced
at a later period and reads back from them, which is precisely what
Frank does with
Notesfrom the House of the Dead
(1864), a detailed and
cautiously
speculative analysis of which becomes the centerpiece of the
volume.
The difficult thing to explain is the marked shift in Dostoevsky's
attitude during his term of hard labor and exile toward the peasantry
(which in Russian is virtually the equivalent of the
narod,
the people
or the folk) and tsarist authority. In the past, he had been conde–
scending in a liberal way to the peasant, who, caught in the primitive
ways of backward Russia, needed to be "helped." He had rebelled
against tsarist authority as the mainstay of serfdom, an order he
detested . The mystery is: how could his prison experience, during
which he was appalled at the savagery and brutality of his fellow–
convicts of the peasant class, during which they treated him as al–
most absolutely an outsider, an alien from a privileged class, during
which he was for years at the mercy and caprice of a drunken and in-
