'There are many ideas I haven’t yet written down. They will lacerate me, it is true! But I have my heart and flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this, after all, is life.'

Alex Christofi has written an intimate portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky, one that beautifully connects his personal life with his great work. He wrote his way through, if not out, of personal tragedies. The pen seemed to be at ready to spill each fresh misery that cropped up during his many trials and tribulations, be they born from the seed of love or politics. A man who used even his mock execution during his brutal imprisonment to write a semi-autobiographical novel about the inmates in a Siberian prison camp. Dostoevsky’s writing always seemed to flow from what he was confronted by in life. There was an untold amount of tragedy, some at fate’s mysterious hands but often, like all of us, by his own making. Gambling, poor choices of the heart, deaths, illness- so much plagued our dear author from his earliest loss, that of his mother. Without question, his health influenced his work and was in and of itself a curious thing, epilepsy. So little understood about it during his lifetime, how can it not have affected Fyodor’s thoughts, creativity? Make him question his very mortality?

The phases of his life from childhood to his dying day, the people dear to him as much as those he resented, the pleasures and disturbances of his very existence, all of it found a way into his fiction and, as Christofi points out within these pages, made for autobiographical work. Dostoevsky didn’t need to leave behind memoirs, for he was present in everything he wrote. He pinned human behavior as no other, from the foolish to the profound, and that is why even today the wisdom of his words reaches many readers’ souls. He suffered, lord he suffered like no other. He was contrary, he pursued his desperate wants only to later reflect with keen perception how we never seem to be satisfied with attainment, that the rush is in the chase. He understood humiliation, the misery of insult, the imbalance of class, the madness of politics, the contrary nature of man, and he penetrated the very heart of every emotion that can be born of any situation and was able to express it through characters. Alex Christofi writes beautifully of the author I felt I was observing for an entire lifetime, one who is both grand and small.

This book is far less static than other biographical accounts of Dostoevsky, it is factual but with fictional breezes of Fyodor’s writing blowing through. Fyodor isn’t the only person brought to life, all too often when a historical figure is written about, the people surrounding them fall flat. Not here! The women that he loved, who caused him desire so strong he trembled, pulse with life, even when fading from their own story as consumptive Maria. Polina is the fire, the wildcard and would be assassin, a woman he can’t help but draw close and cling to, despite the burn. Later it is the young Anna, his stenographer who he falls in love with and uses a story to tell her of his love for her. Anna becomes his dearly devoted second wife and mother to his children, sticking by him despite his debts, gambling addictions, the crippling loss of their two children and severe illness. Anna is a beacon to his troubled soul, and their love story as great as anything he has written. She is the one who carries on his legacy, what does a man do to deserve such a faithful, intelligent partner?

I wasn’t expecting to be as deeply engaged as I was. You don’t need to be familiar with Dostoevsky to enjoy the read but certainly a book any fan would enjoy. Every person in his orbit is humanized. Beautifully written, the connections, the facts, the emotions, the timeline- it’s quite the journey. Yes, read it.

Publication Date: March 23, 2021

Bloomsbury USA

After 8 months in prison, a group of young men sentenced to death for sharing “treasonous” literature is marched into a wintry square. The first three men are blindfolded and tied to posts, as the next group looks on. At that moment, a messenger arrives, commuting their sentences to prison in Siberia – all personally orchestrated by the Tsar of Russia for maximum drama. One of the second three was the 28-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky, a struggling writer. I recall vividly when I first read about this moment, an awestruck high school student, devouring every word Dostoevsky ever wrote. The idea of looking directly into the face of death was made appallingly real for the first time to one healthy, typical teenager. I couldn’t talk about it for days.
Alex Christofi’s biography opens with this scene. Christofi – a former literary agent, editor, and novelist - blends superbly-chosen passages from letters, quotes, remembered conversations, and several different Dostoevsky novels: one of the most dramatic moments in literary history, as crafted by one of its giants – with a little editing.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky: philosopher and early psychologist. Writer of long, impassioned, complicated, argumentative, political novels – dark, dour, serious… humorless? And all those Russian names! Didn’t Joseph Frank pretty much say everything that could be said in his monumental 5-volume biography? Christofi has staked out a very specific territory – Dostoevsky’s love life, in various meanings of that phrase – and does it in an unusual, creative, and largely successful way.
Christofi lets you know upfront what he’s about: “This book…cheerfully commits an academic fallacy.” As demonstrated in the opening scene, he combines elements of straight biography, and weaves into it recorded or remembered conversations, letters, and Dostoevsky’s own writings “in the hope of creating the effect of a reconstructed memoir.” (p. xiii) If it’s in quotes, the speaker actually said it. Italics signal a passage from Dostoevsky’s writing. Christofi binds it all together with his own voiceover, and admits to compressing, editing, abridging, and otherwise making it neat. It takes a little getting used to.
“Cheerful” aptly describes Christofi’s tone throughout. He loves a quip. He depicts Dostoevsky’s childhood home, with seven children crammed into a little apartment, behind partitions, on the couch, and “little ones strewn around their parents’ bedroom as a traditional prophylactic.” (p. 5) After months of work, Dostoevsky desperately seeks a place to publish his first novel. Christofi blithely remarks how he “considered the options (self-publish it, throw himself into the Neva, etc.).” (p. 20) Dostoevsky, with his solemn, nervous demeanor, was often teased by his more happy-go-lucky friends, who tried to fix him up with a young woman. Christofi comments that “Fyodor…sadly failed to capitalise on this opportunity for a flirtation by losing consciousness and falling to the floor.” (p. 26) This borders on cruelty, about a man whose life was wracked by epilepsy. Not to malign literary agents, but perhaps there is a predilection towards what will entertain, what will “hook” a reader, what might raise a smile, versus what might be better suited to the subject. While his footnote debunking the apocryphal “when Dostoevsky met Dickens” anecdote is crisp, funny, and convincing, other footnotes can ramble a bit farther afield than necessary.
How did Dostoevsky love? Much of the focus is on his mostly painful series of romantic relationships: a dismissal because he is too poor, a change of heart when he gets a raise, then appalled rejection when he has a grand mal seizure on their wedding night (in his own delicious phrase: “The black cat ran between us.”). A self-abasing pursuit of an unstable, manipulative young woman who is in love with someone else. Impulsive proposals to women he barely knew, including one who was nursing her terminally-ill husband. It is a litany of misery. Then he meets Anna, the young stenographer who helps him get his novel The Gambler into shape. Christofi promises in his introduction that Dostoevsky’s “bashful” proposal to her will make you “[want] to hug him.” Instead, it’s strange, oblique, and more than a little guileful – but you can’t say Anna doesn’t know what she’s getting into. For once, he is in love with someone honorable and loyal. Broke and rootless, they wander through Europe’s spa towns, and Dostoevsky’s gambling addiction explodes. Every ducat and thaler won and lost, every item pawned (including Anna’s wedding ring, more than once), every tear-stained confession and bestowal of forgiveness are detailed. It is a long, sordid section to read. After the birth of their second daughter, he finally swears off the roulette wheel… Germany closed its gambling halls about this time, which doubtless helped. And all the while, he is writing. At one point, working on The Devils, he poignantly comments: “If I had two or three years of support for the novel, the way Turgenev, Goncharov or Tolstoy do, I would write the sort of thing people would still be talking about in a hundred years.” (p. 159) I hope he knows we still do.
Now devotedly married, other kinds of love take Dostoevsky by storm. He is staggered by his terrible love for their children. But their baby daughter dies of pneumonia, and his youngest son dies horribly of a massive seizure at the age of three. (A seizure. Imagine the heartbreak of the father.) He is supporting his stepson from that first blighted marriage, a thankless and expensive task, but one he feels he owes out of charity and family obligation. His religiosity grows, with a passionate devotion to Christ and his message of unlimited, unselfish love of one’s fellows as the only possible salvation from human suffering. He is working on the massive Brothers Karamazov, cramming everything he has ever thought, pondered, loved, and felt into one enormous story. His seizures worsen. Modern neuroscientists have examined what we can glean of his seizure disorder, and some have suggested temporal lobe epilepsy or Geschwind syndrome. This can manifest as hypergraphia (a compulsion to write), hyper-religiosity, and extreme emotional states, or ecstasies – St. Theresa of Avila showed similar behaviors. It would have been interesting if Christofi had explored this possible contribution Dostoevsky’s emotional and mental states.
Back to that teenager I once was, thrilled by the angst, desperation, heroism, and suffering of Raskolnikov, Myshkin, the Karamazovs and the rest. I can still read Crime & Punishment with awe and affection, but when I went back to Karamazov in middle age, I found the endless hand-wringing and moaning Just Too Much. “Get a grip!” I wanted to shout at them. Dostoevsky’s years of ill-chosen, ill-conducted, impulsive affairs (financial and emotional), can produce sighs of woe, pity, disbelief, and impatience. But Dostoevsky himself noted that when he first fell in love (in his mid-thirties, after 8 years in prison and the military), “I was happy, and I couldn’t [write].” (p. 60) Oh, Fyodor…
But at last… six months before his death, Dostoevsky is invited to address a gathering to honor the poet Pushkin. He enraptured the crowd, extolling the power of brotherly love, and choosing to suffer oneself rather than cause anyone else to suffer. The audience cheered, clapped, wept, mobbed him, wouldn’t let him leave. At last. At last. Flooded with the love he had sought so long.
There are occasional lapses in tone. Christofi’s prose sometimes jars when rubbing up against Dostoevsky’s, as it does throughout this tapestry he has woven, but also highlights the glories of Dostoevsky’s own words. The best of this book may be to turn a reader back to Dostoevsky, with a fuller picture of the heart of the writer. I may even take another crack at Karamazov.

You might have heard of Dostoevsky—might have decided to read one of his novels—but if you haven’t read one or have only just learned his name, know that Dostoevsky is considered one of the most representative writers of 19th century Russia in the same way that Charles Dickens is considered one of the most representative writers of 19th century Great Britain and the English-reading world. They both focused on the poor and the dispossessed in their literature, insisting on the humanity of the downtrodden, and through characters and circumstances presented, both writers helped give recognizable qualities to national identity.

The title of this book may have the potential reader thinking it is about Dostoevsky’s romantic life, but it is about so much more. It is about his love of life, mankind, philosophy, God and literature as well as his driving passion to understand why he was dealt the circumstances he and the rest of his nation lived in. He was quite honestly in love with Russia. Though he enjoyed inexpensive (then) places to live and write like Switzerland, he always felt the need to be in the most dynamic centers of Russia.

When Fyodor Dostoevsky was little, his father, a hard-working doctor, was recognized for zealous medical service, for which he was awarded the Order of St Anna. This recognition by the government lifted the family from its poverty to a position at which they could afford to hire staff—a coachman, cook, maid and nanny. The boost up the hierarchical caste system placed the family at the lowest level of gentry and gave the family rights that people in the free world take for granted. I paused every time I read that Dostoevsky or his family gained a right or permission because the situation reminded me of almost two decades living in a monarchical autocracy, where I could not work or own property or inherit (due to being a foreigner). Similarly, 19th century Russia had (and many other countries today still have) a far different societal system than what is familiar to Western readers. The Order of St. Anna bestowed upon Dr. Dostoevsky gave him the right to purchase land and own his own place. Before that, he could only rent. Still, gentry could go into debt, which fate befell both Dr. Dostoevsky and his son after him. In (Fyodor’s case, however, much of the debt was senselessly self-inflicted.)

The reader must imagine that the child, Fyodor, and his brother Mikhail, would have been thrilled by the rise up the ladder and proud of their father for achieving the recognition that made them gentry. That career boost probably created a sense of gratitude towards the tsar in Dostoevsky, which helps to explain why Russians had a hard time trying to figure out what side Dostoevsky was on—that of the poor or the ruling elite. Like Dickens, he knew people on both sides of the train tracks, but the Russian writer could be said to have suffered far more than the British. Dostoevsky’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was a teen and the family broke apart, just like that. Dostoevsky showed his love of literature early and belonged to a group that discussed books critical of tsarist Russia for which he was sentenced to many years in a Siberian prison camp and then more years of military service in exile. His sufferings seemed to have known no bound. I read about them with a cold hand gripping my intestines, wondering how he could possibly have endured all he did and still have found love and acclaim.

But he managed, with his latter marriage being a happy one and his years of literary endeavor bringing him the kind of recognition every writer dreams of—with all kinds of misery filling the gaps. Even the most dedicated reader of literary greats will wonder whether Dostoevsky did not arrive at good luck through sheer happenstance, for he lived in a political climate with nothing but traps and holes. This is the kind of book that will have readers rummaging through the end notes, sorry there is not more to read. I adored the comments about the influence of Dostoevsky’s writing after his death.

It takes a certain kind of sadism to offer up for advanced reading a biography that featured encoded dates. Yes, Bloomsbury, talking about you here…so not ok. Especially because the book itself is excellent, exactly the kind of bio I enjoy. It’s well written, well paced, erudite, interesting and read just as engagingly as a good work of fiction might. But every single number in the book is encoded, dates, ages, distances, you name it, it’s a doodle. Mind you, the encoding isn’t Enigma worthy, it’s easy enough to figure out some of the years and from that figure out what number each symbol represents and continue to do mental substitutions for the duration of the book, but who wants to do that. This book has enough educational information without bringing maths into it. So yeah, reading experience…a mixed bag to say the least and entirely publisher’s fault. The author did a great job.
Now then, Dostoevsky. One of the literary giants. Unquestionably. For my money, one of the best writers of dark psychology, ever. A man simply had an innate profound understanding of basic drivers like guilt, fear, sadness, etc. Sure, some of it must have just been bred in by his motherland, much like vodka to babies, a certain kind of melancholy is typically mainlined in from the start. But there’s also other aspects of his life to consider, a strange life of ups and downs, prolonged times of unhappiness interrupted by radiant joy.
I’ve just recently watched a thing about his mock execution. It was a dementedly wild thing to have occurred to someone so young, but the more you learn about the man’s life, the less you think of it as wild or at least wildly uncharacteristic. So Dostoevsky as a young man was a subject to a staged mock execution for his rebellious antiestablishment rebel ways. Pardoned at the last minute, he was sent to four year of labor instead. Afterwards, he found himself stuck in the outskirts of the country, far from the civilized world, he vanquished desperately, trying to write, trying to romance the woman who became his first wife, trying to get by.
Eventually, something like a pardon permitted his return, he began publishing, integrating into the literary society, etc. And yet, his life seemed far from happy, his marriage didn’t’ work out, his love life was one of desperate fails, there was never enough money, there was a useless stepson to be stuck with indefinitely, etc.
In fact, it seems that only in his 40s upon marrying a absolutely devoted to him woman ½ his age did Dostoevsky finally found some contentment in his life. For one thing, he finally became a devoted father, though that wasn’t without tragedy either, as only two of his 4 kids survived childhood. And so he did his best, he wrote his best, he finally got the acclaim he so very much deserved and then…he died, at a relatively young age of 56, completely worn out by life’s verisimilitudes. And left behind a body of work cherished by book lovers to this day. A sort of immortality, really.
So that’s Dostoevsky in love. In life he was more complicated, a devout Christian who wrote of such dark matters, a rebel turned tsarist, a devoted family man and a degenerate gambler who systematically pissed away family money, a great talent whose track record was all over the place, an ambitious magazine publisher who barely managed to stay afloat, a man with familial responsibilities he took very seriously, but one who was absolutely terrible with money. A difficult life, but one that makes for a read just as interesting as his imaginary exploits.
This was an excellent book in that it did a terrific job presenting not just the life of its protagonist, but also the epoch it was lived in, in other words, it presented a complex layered context of the place and time that produced such a man, such a mind. The turbulent era of political upheavals, of grand ideas and brutal executions of thereof, the time of tsars and serfs and Nihilists and anarchists and some genuinely spectacular literature.
Dostoevsky didn’t have the money afforded leisure of Tolstoy, he wrote with desperate urgency of a man just trying to get by, he had to curb resentments, deal with rivalries, press and manipulative dishonest publishers. And yet, throughout it all, he persevered admirably, championed and supported by the proverbial love of a good woman and left behind the books that still excite the imagination and expand our understanding of essential psychology, of what makes a person function or, in some many cases, malfunction. The way he wrote about things, be it guilt (Crime and Punishment) or paranoia (Double), it’s…timeless. The essential definition of a classic. It stands the test of time.
You may question Dostoevsky as a person, his ideas and believes, though he was very much a product of his time. But as a writer he is more or less beyond reproach.
It would stand to reason a book about a great writer should be a great read and this one definitely lived up to that notion. If only Bloomsbury provided a reading copy worthy of its context. So yeah, maybe wait for the book to actually come out to enjoy it. Unless you’re great with numerical substitution codes. But definitely a very good read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.