david foster wallace joseph frank's dostoevsky

Frank's penetrative gaze leaves no question unresolved and this compilation proves to be an invaluable companion to Dostoevsky's most significant writings.Īfter a brief introduction in which Frank clarifies that the main target of the lectures is to 'introduce the main literary and ideological elements' of Dostoevsky's work, the American academic presents an in-depth analysis of seven novels: Poor Folk, The Double, The House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky's novels are explored through the lens of the socio-political reality in Russia at the time as well as the peculiar idiosyncrasy of the writer himself that is often projected to some of his most well-known characters. Frank's five-volume biography on the Russian literary giant, an iconic work that exceeds the 2500 pages, deem him the aptest person to analyze Dostoevsky's body of work and these never-before-published collection of Stanford lectures examine one-by-one the most significant novels that marked modern literature and earned the author a place among the greatest European philosophers and intellectuals of the two previous centuries. Joseph Frank was an American professor of comparative literature at the Universities of Stanford and Princeton and his name is inextricably linked with the painstaking study of one of the most influential writers of the 19th century, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

David foster wallace joseph frank's dostoevsky