Dull Orgies

Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821-1849 By Joseph Frank Princeton University Press, 401 pp., $16.50 How many times, reading one of the current esteemed biographies, do we hear the echo of Lytton Strachey rebounding down the decades? “To preserve . . . a becoming brevity—a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant—that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.” Thus spoke the master of biography-in-miniature as he introduced his Eminent Victorians. I fear Strachey’s antidote is once again in order. Fat biographies are in fashion, and, as in Strachey’s day, they are suffocating the art.

Consider the present effort, the first part of Professor Joseph Frank’s projected four-decker on Dostoevsky. Here we find all the elements that drive gentle scholastics to superlatives: exhaustive, monumental, definitive. Here is an adventure in thoroughness, a repository of sound judgments. Here is a celebration of minutiae and an orgy of needlethreading. Here is a very dull book.

MR

About the Author

Mitchell S. Ross

Featured Tags

Manage following

Literature

Russia

Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821-1849 By Joseph Frank Princeton University Press, 401 pp., $16.50 How many times, reading one of the current esteemed biographies, do we hear the echo of Lytton Strachey rebounding down the decades? “To preserve . . . a becoming brevity—a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant—that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer.” Thus spoke the master of biography-in-miniature as he introduced his Eminent Victorians. I fear Strachey’s antidote is once again in order. Fat biographies are in fashion, and, as in Strachey’s day, they are suffocating the art.

Consider the present effort, the first part of Professor Joseph Frank’s projected four-decker on Dostoevsky. Here we find all the elements that drive gentle scholastics to superlatives: exhaustive, monumental, definitive. Here is an adventure in thoroughness, a repository of sound judgments. Here is a celebration of minutiae and an orgy of needlethreading. Here is a very dull book.