I feel like I've always known the broad picture of Dostoevsky's life, although if (before this book) you were to ask me about them, I would probably reply: almost execution, massive gambling problem, and depression? By which I mean to say, I always felt like I knew a lot about Dostoevsky without really knowing about him. Perhaps because his books, almost all masterpieces in their own right, seemed suffused with a degree of personal touch, all tied together by a tapestry of human misery that made it certain you knew enough about the man without needing any of the actual details of the life he lived. In a sense, "Dostoevsky in Love" does not dispel this vision of Dostoevsky as a tortured soul whose existence weighed heavily on him. Rather, Christofi's biography which follows a parallel line between the writer's life and his work serves to cement my understanding of Dostoevsky as a writer whose worldview infused his work in ways that are more obvious than in other writers.

And yet, even writing the lines above feels like I am writing only a half-truth. For it would be a lie to say that I finished Christofi's work on Dostoevsky unchanged. Or at least my perception of Dostoevsky himself has shifted. For, as the title of this work belies, there was much that Dostoevsky loved, there was much in this world that he cherished and held dear which is perhaps also why his work is suffused with a love for humanity that he can't give up on regardless of his bleaks his vision gets sometimes.

A succinct and gripping adventure into the lives of one of my favorite authors and thinkers. A balanced account of loss, love, and literature that marks a great entry into the existence and mind of a great poet.

If you, just like me, are a fan of Dostoevsky’s work, you will definitely enjoy Dostoevsky in Love:An Intimate Life. And even if you haven’t read any of his books, you’ll learn about what it felt like living in 19th century Russia (and other European countries), and I am certain that upon reading this, you’ll go and grab one of Dostoevsky’s books.

Synopsis:

Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life is a detailed biography of the life of Dostoevsky, mixed with a bit of creative freedom. Alex Christofi tells the story of Dostoevsky’s life using quotes from Dostoevsky’s books, as well as from letters and diaries.

My Thoughts:

It’s not very often I read biographies. If I read a biography, it has to be from someone I know a lot about and am curious about. I was going to say that it’s also from people I really admire, but I love reading biographies about serial killers, so maybe that’s not the best statement to put in words. However, from all the biographies I’ve read, this one certainly jumps at the top of my list, firstly because of its uniqueness. Alex Christofi not only shows us the life of Dostoevsky and his works, but he digs much deeper than that. We get to know Dostoevsky on a very personal level, able to read his thoughts, re-live his experiences and witness his many tragedies in life and few of his moments of happiness.

Starting with his mock execution, we immediately get a glimpse of the terror Dostoevsky goes through. I can only imagine how that experience can leave a mark on you – for life. Then we follow his years in prison, his illness, his romantic life and his gambling addiction. The joy he experiences when his first child is born, and the pain he suffers when many people he loves keep dying around him.

“Suffering and pain are always mandatory for broad minds and deep hearts. Truly great people, it seems to me, should feel great sadness on this earth.”

I went into Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life with only a basic knowledge of Dostoevsky’s life, but a more broader knowledge of his works.

And I know now, where this genius has come from.
He always had the truly remarkable gift to be able to write, but his experiences in life certainly made him understand pain, grief, human psychology and interaction on such a deeper level, in a way that not many people can truly comprehend. This biography not only made me much more understanding of his life, but also made me eager to re-read all his works now, knowing what I know about his life. And not only his life, but also the period he lived in as well, the politics, the social groups of authors and people’s interactions with one another.

“Everywhere in Russia there have always been, and always will be certain strange individuals who, while humble and by no means lazy, are destined to be broke for ever.”

I admire Alex Christofi for his detailed research and the work he put into this book.
He was able to combine extracts from Dostoevsky’s books into experiences that Dostoevsky lived through. And connect the events with when the books were written. I had mixed feelings on this creative freedom at first, but very soon I started to enjoy it, and it brought the writer and the works closer together in my world. We can feel moments, when an event would happen to Dostoevsky, and how this reflects in his books. How it inspired him to start a book, how a character matches a person from his life. I really wished that we read more about the time he was writing “Crime and Punishment”. It was mentioned a lot of times, but it never was associated with any moment in his life. I am wondering about how this book came to be, and the initial response it received from the public.

There’s a reason why Dostoevsky is such an important person in the world literature. Why many of his books are classics and are being read and studied in schools even today. He has brought a view on psychology and sociology through fiction. There is yet an author to try and create something as remarkable as what Dostoevsky did in his time.

“If we take the trouble to honour the dead, perhaps one day someone will remember us.”

I have never heard or read anything about Dostoevsky. The author explains in detail and shows how much research he has conducted about Dostoevsky’s emotional and personal life. The book discusses in length Dostoevsky suffering a mock execution, being sentenced to hard labour, gambling issues and serving as a private in the army.

The book is colourful and eyecatching and would make me pick it up in a bookstore.

Anyone who reads my Goodreads reviews will know I am no fan of overly long books. So I was delighted when, one year ago, author Alex Christofi announced in the Guardian “I am the book murderer, an accusation that he attracted for his unconventional, but to me entirely understandable approach to reading large tomes, by literally tearing the book into manageable chunks.

One of the books featured in the accompanying illustration was Joseph Frank’s biography of Doestevsky’s, a volume that itself was a mere 984 page ‘condensed’ version of the 2500 page multi-volume original:

https://i.ibb.co/rttwXFK/Books-1daf.jpg

Christofi has praised Frank’s work, if not its physical manifestation, but in Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life he presents us with a much more manageable (c. 200 pages) and innovative approach to the life of an author, who, as James Joyce said, was he “more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence”.

Chrisofi explains his approach to Doestevsky’s life story:

“Undoubtedly his most powerful writing was drawn from his lived experience, whether recounting the quasi-mystical experience of an epileptic fit in The Idiot or hard labour in a Siberian prison in Notes from the House of the Dead.

This book therefore cheerfully commits an academic fallacy, which is to elide Dostoevsky’s autobiographical fiction with his fantastical life in the hope of creating the effect of a reconstructed memoir. (The fact is, this is neither a story nor a memoir.)”

Sitting between Frank’s “wonderful five-volume intellectual biography” and the novelistic approach of Leonid Tsypkin (‘Summer in Baden Baden’ in the translation by Roger and Angela Keys) and Coetzee (‘The Master of Petersburg’):

“My aim is to explore whether a synthesis is possible – a tale both novelistic and true to life, representing Dostoevsky in his own words. Because Dostoevsky’s overarching project was to understand how people thought – the sometimes maddening ways we explain and deceive ourselves – and to represent that thought faithfully so that others might know themselves better.”

He does so my not only following Doestevsky’s life in parallel with his work, but by using the author’s own words, sometimes directly quoted, but more often re-written in the intimate first person as his thoughts by using material from his letters, notebooks, journalism, and, most effectively, his fiction.

It makes for a fascinating read - as does Doestevsky’s own passionate, dramatic, religiously- fervent and gambling-addicted life.

As a couple of minor gripes:

In such a compact, non-academic work and one centered on the author’s own words, there was an overuse of irrelevant footnotes (such as Somerset Maugham’s words on when authors are hailed as prophets, or the well-rehearsed joke about the different names of St Petersburg).

And, the detail of Dostevesky’s gambling habits got a little repetitive. It was clearly key to his life, and it was necessary to make that clear via repetition, but it didn’t really need the detailed enumeration of his daily or even hourly wins and losses on each spree.

Nevertheless, recommended. 4 stars.

Although I have read most of Dostoevsky’s works, I have never read his biography. The author takes an interesting approach and puts Dostoevsky’s emotional and personal life central of his life. And what a life it was. Indeed this opens with Dostoevsky suffering a mock execution, which resulting in him being informed that, rather than being killed, he would be sentenced to four years hard labour, before being forced to serve as a private in the army. I suspect many would take such a sentence more favourably had they seriously considered a bullet to be the alternative, but it is certainly a strong opening.

Christofi then takes the reader back to his birth at a Hospital for the Poor, where his father was a doctor. As Dostoevsky’s father aged, he seemed to become more discontented and was, possibly, killed by peasants at the small estate he owned. Later, Christofi muses that Dostoevsky – once arrested - faced the irony of being killed by peasants, who disliked and distrusted, political prisoners, when he had been imprisoned for plotting their emancipation.

As the title of the book shows, this biography focuses on Dostoevsky’s personal life. Not only romantic, as we read of his love for his mother and brother. However, there are also long rides to try to convince his first wife to marry him, with love quickly turning to disappointment. Romance and a second marriage to the, almost Saintly patient, Anna, who refused to blame her husband, even when his gambling meant that he constantly pawned her wedding ring. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s gambling obsession was so bad that it is almost painful to read about it. At one point, leaving a town where he has lost everything the couple had, he leaves the train they were leaving on, to go and lose their remaining few coins; the lure of the casino was so strong.

Despite his faults, Dostoevsky personally had a lot of warmth; especially in his love of children. Although, again, there are tragedies, he obviously adored his children. He would dress as a polar bear, strand his giggling children on ‘ice floes,’ and stalk them to gobble them up. The sight of a child always warmed him and he had endless patience with them; once sitting up most of the night with his son, who was unable to leave his Christmas present behind to go to bed.

If, like me, you know little of Dostoevsky’s life, this will be a joy to read. I found it utterly compelling and a fascinating portrait of a literary life. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

Brilliant and genre-bending biography of Dostoevsky, using his own words where feasible. Such an imaginative approach, and what a fascinating life.

I've asked the author to do an interview with us (Five Books) before the end of January, which I think will be very popular with our audience.

Alex Christophi takes an interesting approach in writing of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, a fascinating and original blend of biographical facts interspersed with his varied fiction, which Christophi claims contains relevant aspects for the memoir Dostoevsky never got to write before his death at the age of 56. If you are looking for a straightforward biography of one of Russia's greatest 19th century writers, acclaimed for his ability to reveal the human soul and penetrate the deepest depths of the human psyche, then I would suggest looking elsewhere. I wanted to read this because The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment are two of my all time favourite novels, albeit I read them quite some time ago. The 'in love' part of the title is approached in the broadest possible terms, such as applying to his family, such as brother Mikhail, his children, the 3 main women he was in love with, his love of literature and writing itself, religion, the underclass, and humanity as a whole.

Fyodor was particularly poor at managing his finances, living most of his life in debt, exacerbated by his gambling addiction, responsible for the heavy pressures on him to write, and resulting in him being ripped off by dishonest publishers. His poor health was to plague him throughout his life, at the mercy of epileptic seizures, about which he was never fully open about with his first wife, Maria, which resulted in his marriage going downhill. His fraught and turbulent life echoes the political turbulence of Russia itself, leading him to be seen as the state of nation writer. He had shifting contrary political and social perspectives through time, a committed believer in the Russian Orthodox Church, although he had his doubts, unsurprising, given the loss of two of his children which hit him hard. The narrative takes the reader through his experiences at a Siberian prison camp, the intense discussions, conflicts and rivalries in the writers circles, falling in love for the first time in his mid-thirties with a married woman, Maria, whom he married but not before a mass of emotional melodrama, his affair with student Polina, she harbours radical thoughts of assassinating the Tsar, and his second marriage to Anna, the stenographer, the happiest time of his life, and the other events, philosophy, political thinking, Russia and the people who inspired his writing.

I imagine it took Christophi some considerable time to consider and meld the appropriate extracts from Dostoevsky's influential fiction with his biographical details, but he manages this with such aplomb that I found reading this a riveting and compulsive affair. The only fly in the ointment was the ARC itself from the publisher, with its confusion over time and the difficulties in accessing the references provided at the end, and is the main reason I did not award this 5 stars. Other than this, this was terrifically enjoyable and offered a different, yet highly insightful way, of looking at the life and times of Dostoevsky, a man who loved Pushkin and Charles Dickens, and of Russia itself. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC.

Is this what postmodern auto/biography looks like? Christofi gleefully announces upfront that he's blending biographical details with selected extracts from Dostoyevsky's own writings to stitch together what *might* possibly approximate to what Dostoyevsky *might* have written had he lived to complete an autobiography.

It's an intriguing and provocative concept that shifts boundaries and categories between fiction and non-fiction, between what is known and what conjured up via the imagination, between Dostoyevsky as author and topic, between subject and object. It works, but the idea of 'reality' is always a shimmering mirage that we can't necessarily trust - but, then, is conventional biography no more than a similar construct?

Interesting, then, on two levels - for what it tells us, and the ontological questions it implicitly is asking about the nature of knowing oneself and others.