The term 'biography' seems insufficiently capacious to describe the singular achievement of Joseph Frank's five-volume study of the life of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. One critic, writing upon the publication of the final volume, casually tagged the series as the ultimate work on Dostoevsky 'in any language, and quite possibly forever.' Frank himself had not originally intended to undertake such a massive work. The endeavor began in the early 1960s as an exploration of Dostoevsky's fiction, but it later became apparent to Frank that a deeper appreciation of the fiction would require a more ambitious engagement with the writer's life, directly caught up as Dostoevsky was with the cultural and political movements of mid- and late-nineteenth-century Russia.Already in his forties, Frank undertook to learn Russian and embarked on what would become a five-volume work comprising more than 2,500 pages. The result is an intellectual history of nineteenth-century Russia, with Dostoevsky's mind as a refracting prism. The volumes have won numerous prizes, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.

作者介绍

约瑟夫•弗兰克（Joseph Frank，1918—2013） 普林斯顿大学比较文学荣誉教授，斯坦福大学比较文学和斯拉夫语语言文学荣誉教授。代表作五卷本《陀思妥耶夫斯基》曾获美国国家图书奖（传记类），两次（美国大学优秀学生联谊会的）克里斯蒂安•高斯奖，两次（现代语言协会的）詹姆斯•拉塞尔•洛厄尔奖，《洛杉矶时报》图书奖以及另外一些荣誉。另著有《现代小说的空间形式》、《宗教与理性之间：俄国文学与文化随笔》、《回应现代性：文化政治随笔》等。

译者介绍

戴大洪 1982年毕业于北京工业学院（现北京理工大学）光学工程系。译有《第三共和国的崩溃：1940年法国崩溃之研究》、《雷蒙德•卡佛：一位作家的一生》、《古拉格：一部历史》。