Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life

Summary

Dostoevsky's life was marked by brilliance and brutality. Sentenced to death as a young revolutionary, he survived mock execution and Siberian exile to live through a time of seismic change in Russia, eventually being accepted into the Tsar's inner circle. Somehow, amidst all this, he found time to write short stories, journalism, and novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, works now recognized as among the finest ever written.

In Dostoevsky in Love Alex Christofi weaves carefully chosen excerpts of the author's work with the historical context to form an illuminating and often surprising whole. The result is a novelistic life that immerses the listener in a grand vista of Dostoevsky's world. Along the way, Christofi relates the stories of the three women whose lives were so deeply intertwined with Dostoevsky's: the consumptive widow Maria; the impetuous Polina who had visions of assassinating the Tsar; and the faithful stenographer Anna.

Christofi reconstructs the memoir Dostoevsky might have written had life—and literary stardom—not intervened. He gives us a new portrait of the artist as never before seen: a shy but devoted lover, an empathetic friend of the people, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.