‘Dostoevsky in Love’ Review: Possessed by Words

Sentenced and reprieved, exiled and returned, Fyodor Dostoevsky made human suffering the center of his work.

Image (not from article): "Monument to the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky near the Russia State Library in Moscow, sculptor A. Rukavishnikova, 1997" from

Book Review by Sara Wheeler, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 29, 2021 11:19 am ET [original article contains illustrations.] 

A British publishing executive who has written two novels, including the prizewinning “Glass,” Mr. Christofi has produced what he calls “a reconstructed memoir” eliding extracts from Dostoevsky’s public and private writings with the events of his life. After all, as Mr. Christofi says, “the ghost of his autobiography is already present in his writings.” At the outset of “Dostoevsky in Love,” he sets out his methodology (“some ground rules”). Quotation marks signal lines taken directly from Dostoevsky or a contemporary. “Intimate” material drawn from letters, notebooks, journalism or fiction appears, without quotation marks, in italic, indicating, “anything . . . represented as his thought.” It is an ambitious concept, and it works. Mr. Christofi backs up his work with 452 endnotes. In short, he has not made things up. Instead, “where I have ventured to attribute this inner life to a timeline,” he says, “I have paraphrased, combined and abridged what Dostoevsky wrote to fit the context.” 

The life was not uneventful. Born in 1821, Dostoevsky became “a literary sensation, literally overnight” at 25 with the novel “Poor Folk.” He was a youthful free thinker; the secret police soon had him in their sights. Accused of fomenting rebellion through the distribution of seditious material, in 1849 he was sentenced to death. He was standing in the snow of Semyonovsky Square, next in line for the firing squad as the first three prisoners were hooded and tied to stakes. The gathered people fell silent. Then hooves pounded across the square bringing a reprieve from the czar, which commuted the sentence to four years hard labor in a Siberian prison. Dostoevsky recorded the experience in the lapidary “The House of the Dead.” After that, and mandatory service as an army private on the River Irtysh, in 1859 Dostoevsky was able to return west of the Urals to take up his literary career, forever “plotting a middle way . . . between the radicals and the reactionaries—progressive, but also proudly Russian.” The young Alexander II had started out declaring an intention to lift censorship, as many start out. 

The wispy-bearded Dostoevsky had his first full epileptic fit on his wedding night, and Mr. Christofi reckons that “the marriage never really recovered.” His wife, Maria Dmitrievna, died of tuberculosis in 1864. A second marriage, to the much younger Anna Grigorievna, was long and devoted. She was a saint, really: Dostoevsky was pathologically addicted to gambling and pawned his watch so often that Anna reported they never knew what time it was. “If only,” she confided to her diary, “he could get out of his head that unlucky idea that he is going to win.”

He had six fits a week and worked 15-hour days. Mr. Christofi calls the harrowing description of a fit in “The Idiot” “quasi-mystical.” Besides epilepsy, Dostoevsky had chronic hemorrhoids and persistent emphysema, the latter exacerbated by days hunched over proofs in an overheated and unventilated office, as well as nights trudging through the bitter Petersburg winter. 

In 1863, Dostoevsky set out on a sequence of European travels, as did most Russian writers of the Golden Age. Also like many of his peers, he had an equivocal relationship with the west (“Paris is an exceedingly boring city”). Russia had no casinos, and at the roulette tables of German spa towns gambling took hold. Walk-on parts in these sections of “Dostoevsky in Love” include the blue-eyed giant Turgenev, another genius—the latter a judgment with which I suspect, from his waspish comments, Mr. Christofi would disagree.

The title of the book is misleading. The author virtually acknowledges this when he says in an author’s note, “although I will be writing about Dostoevsky as a lover and a husband, I will also be writing about a broader, more inclusive kind of love, which he believed was the only possible answer to suffering in this world.” A personal biography then, but the sociopolitical ferment of Russia does bubble up through Mr. Christofi’s pages. Even the epoch-changing emancipation of the serfs turned out to be an equivocal development: freed serfs had to pay “redemptive dues” to the state treasury for 49 years.

Any writer on Dostoevsky’s life stands in the shadow of the American scholar Joseph Frank, whose five-volume biography, published between 1976 and 2002, remains one of the all-time great literary lives. But Frank’s opus was, as Mr. Christofi admiringly acknowledges, an “intellectual biography” charting its subject’s epic struggles with God, Christ and Orthodoxy. “Dostoevsky in Love,” on the other hand, sets out as a deft sketch. It veils the monstrous side of the subject. What Dostoevsky thought and how he acted were often at variance. (Who among us is immune to this contradiction?) He wrote about humility, but didn’t have much of it; Frank writes of his “boundless vanity and overweening sense of self-importance.” But let’s get to it: Dostoevsky was a rabid xenophobe and anti-Semite.

The translation of Russian literature into English has attracted debate in recent years, some amusingly tinted with the ferocity of the academy. Mr. Christofi generally uses Constance Garnett (“I like her style”), as Frank did; she is my favorite by miles too. Occasionally, and successfully, he uses two translations, picking the best from each, for example in the fabled prison bathhouse scene in “The House of the Dead,” in which “dirty water trickled off them onto the shaven heads of the convicts sitting below them.”

This is not a study of the work, as I have indicated. But Mr. Christofi pays attention to the novels as Dostoevsky’s life unravels. He is good on the genesis of “Crime and Punishment,” serialized in the Russian Herald in 1866 along with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” the latter then titled “1805.” (What a sensational year for the small reading public.) Both books, writes Mr. Christofi, “pitted Napoleonic hubris against Christlike redemption.” The critical success of “Crime and Punishment” catapulted Dostoevsky into the front line of Russian writers: He drew level with Tolstoy (seven years his junior) and Turgenev (three years his senior). But for a long time his books didn’t sell. In 1874 he called into the distribution offices of his publishing firm and learned that “The Idiot,” which had just appeared in a one-volume edition, had moved two copies.

After Siberia, Dostoevsky distrusted the progressive ideology that had influenced him as a young man. He came to consider such dogma harmful—it was all very well to have a revolution, but anarchy might be worse than tyranny, or, as actually was to happen in Russia after 1917, fresh tyranny might be worse still. Mr. Christofi uses the genesis of “Devils” to illustrate this development. The novel, published in installments between 1871 and 1872, satirizes the Nihilists, a group that enjoyed favor among Russian intellectuals. The new generation of socialists such as Sergei Nechaev (whom Mr. Christofi picks out) were not tortured poetic souls as Dostoevsky and his peers had been: They were devils who had possessed the Russian people. At that time, according to Mr. Christofi, Fyodor Mikhailovich “wanted to offer Orthodoxy as a counterpoint and even a solution to Nihilism.” The Russian would have approved of the “christ” in the name of his new biographer.

“I am a storyteller,” avers Mr. Christofi, “not a specialist.” One sees the novelist at work in these pages. Keeping a hand on the narrative tiller, he understands the importance of specificity, as writers must. Thus we see the child Fyodor and his siblings shelling peas in their Moscow apartment; a man wearing a cat-fur collar trying to pass it off as marten; and “eggshell crunching like grit underfoot” in the stairway of Dostoevsky’s seedy lodgings.

Mr. Christofi’s weakness for cliché corrupts his prose. Dostoevsky “went to bite the bullet,” and later “gritted his teeth”; “the critical silence was deafening” and a deal “eye-wateringly bad”; people were “over the moon”—and so it goes on. Cliché is always regrettable, but especially so in a book on a literary master. The reader might also regret anachronistic language such as “passive-aggressive.” I would have liked more glimpses of Dostoevsky’s Petersburg (he moved to the city so dazzlingly depicted in his fiction at 15, after his mother died). On a recent visit, I noticed that the police building on Sadovaya Street, where Raskolnikov confessed, has transitioned to an Apple store.

I greatly enjoyed this book. “He was fiercely devoted,” Mr. Christofi writes of his subject, “to raising up the downtrodden and giving them a voice.” His characters are the dispossessed, and they are still with us; perhaps now more than ever. Readers often fear tackling Dostoevsky’s novels, possibly because of the fuggy reverence that occludes his reputation. Alex Christofi’s welcome volume will dispel anxiety. It would be sad to miss out on one of the greatest novelists ever to have lived. And after all, as Dostoevsky wrote in a letter, “Books are life.”

—Ms. Wheeler is the author, most recently, of “Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia With Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age” [jb: see, which notes: "To Wheeler, if a single characteristic unites Russia, it is misery, 'before, during and after communism.'”]