Dostoevsky review by Josh

Frank's biography is, perhaps, as good as anything by its subject. It helps that Doestovsky’s life in these years was more wild than a character in a novel.

He was arrested for printing subversive tracts, sentenced to be executed, taken out to be executed (czarist Russia didn’t keep people waiting on death row very long), granted a reprieve from the czar, and sent to a decade of labor in Siberia. He seems to have come out this genuinely lovin’ the czar and sincerely grateful for not being killed.

Of course, even if he hated the czar there might not be any evidence in the records. He’d have had the same incentives to kiss the czar’s ass in his published works (they needed to be approved by the censors prior to publication), and even in correspondence (read by secret police) and notes (subject to being seized). Those things make it a bit tough to say with 100% confidence what he (or any other Russian back then) really thought.