Dostoevsky

<p><b>A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary biographies of our time</b> <p/>Joseph Frank's award-winning five-volume <i>Dostoevsky</i> is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography intellectual history and literary criticism <i>Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time</i> illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel <i>Poor Folk</i> to <i>Crime and Punishment</i> and <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i>--by setting them in their personal historical and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.</p>