Byatt wrote: “Frank is that increasingly rare being, an intellectual biographer, and his real concern is with the workings of Dostoevsky’s mind”.įrank’s lecture on The Idiot takes up the perennial problem of its central hero Prince Myshkin – a would-be Christ figure who worsens everything he touches. Underneath his project was the old-fashioned and yet novel assumption that profound creativity is always a sign of profound mental health. He would do this without any relishing of private vices or pathological drives. His task would be to fill in the middle space with the author’s daily stimuli, concrete provocations and constraints. Frank was vexed that their analyses of Dostoevsky were either personal and psychological, or else philosophical and theological. It grew out of his interest in the French Existentialists.
The inside story, which stretched over a quarter-century (1976–2002), was his vast biography of Dostoevsky: five volumes totalling 2,500 pages. That’s the outside institutional envelope. After earning a PhD at the University of Chicago (like the critic Mikhail Bakhtin, without a BA), he taught at Princeton from 1966 to 1985, and then at Stanford. An innovative essay on European modernism won him his first fame and a Fulbright scholarship to Paris in 1950. True, in the late 1930s he attended university classes, but in 1942 he began working as an editor and literary journalist. Joseph Frank (1918–2013) is the greatest co-creator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life in our time, and his path to the top was thrillingly irregular. “There is a patience and wholesomeness to Frank’s voice in these Lectures that has its analogue in his monumental biography, where obsession and perversity are contextualized so thoroughly that they can seem traits of Dostoevsky’s agitated era, not of his person.” Princeton’s Caryl Emerson praises Joe’s “gentle, wisdom-bearing lectures” and writes, “Frank does not co-opt Dostoevsky but cooperates with him, trusting his intentions, and in this sense Frank co-creates his biographical subject he does not airbrush him out.” His lectures were edited by his widow, Marguerite Frank and Marina Brodskaya. He was Stanford’s legendary Dostoevsky scholar – we’ve written about him here and here and here and here. The greatly loved scholar died in 2013. Hoorah! A splendid Times Literary Supplement review for Joseph Frank‘s Lectures on Dostoevsky, published earlier this year by Princeton University Press. Joseph Frank: a “co-creator” of Dostoevsky, with editor and wife Marguerite (Photo: L.A.
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