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The trouble with ideas

How Dostoevsky wrote his way to salvation
by
March 2022, no. 440

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a crime and its punishment by Kevin Birmingham

Allen Lane, $53.25 hb, 432 pp

The trouble with ideas

How Dostoevsky wrote his way to salvation
by
March 2022, no. 440
Portrait of Fedor Dostoyevsky, painted by Vasily Perov in 1872 (Wikimedia Commons)
Portrait of Fedor Dostoyevsky, painted by Vasily Perov in 1872 (Wikimedia Commons)

There really isn’t another biographer like Joseph Frank – nor a biography to place beside his 2,400-page, five-volume life (1976–2002) of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the wildest and most contradictory of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. Frank set out in the late 1970s – a time when historically grounded literary scholarship was losing favour in the academy – to fix Dostoevsky (1821–81) in the complex matrices of Russian history, politics, religion, and culture. An author who had been read in the English-speaking world as a hallucinatory thinker, somewhat detached from reality, could now be seen as one fully imbricated in his era and milieu.

Geordie Williamson reviews 'The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a crime and its punishment' by Kevin Birmingham

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a crime and its punishment

by Kevin Birmingham

Allen Lane, $53.25 hb, 432 pp

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