New Biography of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Reviewed by Jack Seney

In reading a biography of the 1800s Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one can go the route of Joseph Frank's scholarly FIVE VOLUME (!!) bio-opus, and be reading it for a year. Or one can go with Alex Christofi's new biography Dostoyevsky In Love, and get the truncated version in 250-plus pages with something of a focus on Dostoyevsky's love life.

One might add "such as it was" to that, as few writers ever had the same level of bad fortune with romance as Dostoyevsky. Only when he married a much younger woman later in life did he find happiness, and that young lady still had to suffer early in their marriage through terrible episodes of his gambling addiction, as when she accompanied him to Germany for a "summer vacation" that wasn't.

Dostoyevsky's first marriage had numerous problems, not the least of which was his sneaking about to see other women (his unfaithfulness proved no more enjoyable than his marriage). But he stayed with his ill wife and wept honestly upon her untimely death.

His next "great love" was for a flighty young beauty who used him for everything she could and drove him half-mad before he finally ended things with her. Compared to this, his later marriage to the not-prettily-named Anna Snitkina was like a paradise.

The rest of Dostoyevsky's volatile life and work is covered as well here in a to-the-point manner. Dostoyevsky was the product of a "fallen gentry" type of family. He was publishing his first novels at the time he was sent into exiled imprisonment for what was seen as his "radicalism." It took him 10 years to reintegrate into civilian life and continue writing his novels and stories while editing newspapers. By now he was a royalist and nationalist, but he had a great concern for the poor that many others of that political camp did not.

Dostoyevsky suffered from epilepsy, which periodically felled him with seizures. And he had a gambling problem which lowered him with even more depressive poverty.

Dostoyevsky was impoverished by the need to support his relatives, and only achieved any level of financial stability in his last couple of years. Yet his myriad problems allowed him to write true classics like Crime and Punishment, Notes From Underground and The Brothers Karamazov from the very point of view of the damned.

Some have portrayed Dostoyevsky as a nasty and irascible fellow. Indeed, he once growled at the young writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky that: "To write well one must suffer. Suffer!!" But when he died at only age 59 of bleeding in his lung, he was blessed by his wife and children and by the Eastern Orthodox Church, his death portrait showing the face of a man at peace.

I personally prefer lesser-known Dostoyevsky stories and books like "Poor Folk," "The Double," "The Village of Stepanchikovo" and "A Disgraceful Affair." He was not bothered by ideas of "greatness" or "epic achievement" in these and told such tales with a simple power, as well as with hilarious dark humor. But I love the depth and narrative of his famous (if not easy to read) classics as well, unlike some others' "classics" which never fail to bore me cold.