Not surprisingly, the real and imagined lives of Pushkin, Griboedov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Mandelstam, and others have prompted novelistic treatment by significant writers, from Yuri Tynyanov to J.M. The special importance Russians have traditionally assigned to literature has conferred on writers a mythic aura. All three recognize the difficulty of distinguishing Dostoevsky’s actual life from the legends about him. (A third volume is still to come.) The novelist Alex Christofi was similarly inspired, and while his innovative biography, Dostoevsky in Love, occasionally intrigues, it ultimately offers little that’s new. The many fascinating primary sources about Dostoevsky’s life inspired Thomas Marullo to experiment with a new kind of biography in his brilliant Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism. How should one narrate the life of a great writer? Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, now supplemented by his Lectures on Dostoevsky, revivified the form by situating the novelist within the ideological struggles of his day.
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