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[Fwd: An aristocratic aesthete like Nabokov despised Dostoyevsky
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EDITOR's NOTE. VN's distaste for Dostoevsky is well known. In the below
Joseph Frank who has now completed his monumental 5-volume study is
reviewed by the equally distinguished Robert Belknap who mentions VN en
passant. Anyone who wants to investigate the VN-Dostoevsky question
will find Franks' book essential..
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: An aristocratic aesthete like Nabokov despised Dostoyevsky ...
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 16:09:12 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To:
CC:
<http://a188.g.akamaitech.net/f/188/920/1d/www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/images/wponline.gif>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48363-2002Jun13.html
Biography
Fits of Passion
'Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881' by Joseph Frank
Reviewed by Robert L. Belknap
Sunday, June 16, 2002; Page BW04
DOSTOEVSKY
The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881
By Joseph Frank
Princeton Univ. 784 pp. $35
The fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's study of Dostoyevsky marks
the end of a period in the growing up of American thought. Frank has had
a place among our major intellectual historians since 1945, when the
Sewanee Review published his "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," a
landmark in modernism's transition from a subject of manifestos to an
object of serious scholarly intellection. The article became the first
chapter of Frank's 1963 book The Widening Gyre, which remains
indispensable to the understanding of modernism. In his foreword to that
book, Allen Tate wrote, "Mr. Frank is not a New Critic. . . . He is a
philosophical critic with an international point of view; and he is his
own man. I take it that he is the most original critical mind to appear
in America since the Second World War."
I have never dealt closely with Frank but have known and admired him for
years. He is not the kind of scholar who says the same thing in book
after book. Having made his contribution to our understanding of
modernism, he turned to the study of an earlier philosophical figure
with an international point of view who also was most emphatically his
own man: Feodor Dostoyevsky.
At roughly the same time as modernism studies, Dostoyevsky scholarship
was emerging from a world of simplicities. Dostoyevsky's friends and
foes in Russia had treated him in terms of religious and political
absolutes, and his admirers in the West at first had regarded him as a
mighty Scythian, wholly alien to Europe, writing novels that were loose
and baggy monsters, lacking the control that Western civilization would
have offered.
In the years between the wars, André Gide and others introduced the West
to a contrasting idea -- that Dostoyevsky was a literary craftsman --
and the finest Slavic scholars were exploring the depth and breadth of
his literary and philosophical debt to Schiller, Balzac, Dickens and
Hegel. But it was going to take an almost unimaginable exploit of
erudition and synthesis to make a coherent picture of the interaction
between Dostoyevsky's writings and those of the thinkers, journalists
and creative artists around him and further afield. Frank undertook this
effort.
The Russians coined the word dostoevshchina to name the complex of
hysterical, scandalous, morbid and melodramatic features that initially
drew their imagination into a world of self-consciousness and suffering.
Frank set himself the task of understanding Dostoyevsky in the
intellectual world of the 19th century, where French, German and English
thought predominated, and Russians twisted and adapted their heritage to
fit their huge, bureaucratized, corrupt and widely illiterate empire.
Frank has moved Dostoyevsky from the world of dostoevshchina into this
intellectual combat, where he played and continues to play such a
crucial role. An aristocratic aesthete like Nabokov despised Dostoyevsky
as a melodramatic journalist. Frank carries us through the process by
which Dostoyevsky surpassed Dickens and Balzac at turning journalistic
style and issues into overwhelming art. ?
Robert L. Belknap, who has written two books about "The Brothers
Karamazov," is professor emeritus of Russian at Columbia University
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Join the world?s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. Click Here
<http://g.msn.com/1HM505401/47>
Joseph Frank who has now completed his monumental 5-volume study is
reviewed by the equally distinguished Robert Belknap who mentions VN en
passant. Anyone who wants to investigate the VN-Dostoevsky question
will find Franks' book essential..
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: An aristocratic aesthete like Nabokov despised Dostoyevsky ...
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 16:09:12 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
To:
CC:
<http://a188.g.akamaitech.net/f/188/920/1d/www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/images/wponline.gif>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48363-2002Jun13.html
Biography
Fits of Passion
'Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881' by Joseph Frank
Reviewed by Robert L. Belknap
Sunday, June 16, 2002; Page BW04
DOSTOEVSKY
The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881
By Joseph Frank
Princeton Univ. 784 pp. $35
The fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's study of Dostoyevsky marks
the end of a period in the growing up of American thought. Frank has had
a place among our major intellectual historians since 1945, when the
Sewanee Review published his "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," a
landmark in modernism's transition from a subject of manifestos to an
object of serious scholarly intellection. The article became the first
chapter of Frank's 1963 book The Widening Gyre, which remains
indispensable to the understanding of modernism. In his foreword to that
book, Allen Tate wrote, "Mr. Frank is not a New Critic. . . . He is a
philosophical critic with an international point of view; and he is his
own man. I take it that he is the most original critical mind to appear
in America since the Second World War."
I have never dealt closely with Frank but have known and admired him for
years. He is not the kind of scholar who says the same thing in book
after book. Having made his contribution to our understanding of
modernism, he turned to the study of an earlier philosophical figure
with an international point of view who also was most emphatically his
own man: Feodor Dostoyevsky.
At roughly the same time as modernism studies, Dostoyevsky scholarship
was emerging from a world of simplicities. Dostoyevsky's friends and
foes in Russia had treated him in terms of religious and political
absolutes, and his admirers in the West at first had regarded him as a
mighty Scythian, wholly alien to Europe, writing novels that were loose
and baggy monsters, lacking the control that Western civilization would
have offered.
In the years between the wars, André Gide and others introduced the West
to a contrasting idea -- that Dostoyevsky was a literary craftsman --
and the finest Slavic scholars were exploring the depth and breadth of
his literary and philosophical debt to Schiller, Balzac, Dickens and
Hegel. But it was going to take an almost unimaginable exploit of
erudition and synthesis to make a coherent picture of the interaction
between Dostoyevsky's writings and those of the thinkers, journalists
and creative artists around him and further afield. Frank undertook this
effort.
The Russians coined the word dostoevshchina to name the complex of
hysterical, scandalous, morbid and melodramatic features that initially
drew their imagination into a world of self-consciousness and suffering.
Frank set himself the task of understanding Dostoyevsky in the
intellectual world of the 19th century, where French, German and English
thought predominated, and Russians twisted and adapted their heritage to
fit their huge, bureaucratized, corrupt and widely illiterate empire.
Frank has moved Dostoyevsky from the world of dostoevshchina into this
intellectual combat, where he played and continues to play such a
crucial role. An aristocratic aesthete like Nabokov despised Dostoyevsky
as a melodramatic journalist. Frank carries us through the process by
which Dostoyevsky surpassed Dickens and Balzac at turning journalistic
style and issues into overwhelming art. ?
Robert L. Belknap, who has written two books about "The Brothers
Karamazov," is professor emeritus of Russian at Columbia University
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Join the world?s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. Click Here
<http://g.msn.com/1HM505401/47>