October 12, 2020
Fiction writer and book editor Christofi (Glass) provides a novelistic account of the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, with a focus on the Russian writer’s romantic life. Christofi traces Dostoyevsky’s miserable childhood, tempestuous adulthood, and novel-writing career, but also introduces readers to the women in Dostoyevsky’s life. They included Apollinaria Prokofievna Suslov, whom Dostoyevsky had an affair with after she submitted a short story to his literary journal, Time, and Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, who met Dostoyevsky after he advertised for a copyist for The Gambler, and married him soon after. Christofi’s approach pays off in his recreations of intimate scenes—“Deserted by language, Fyodor kissed hand over and over, and they drank hot chocolate together”—and in his revelations about Dostoyevsky’s fiction, as when the novelist confesses, before writing The Brothers Karamazov, “There is a novel in my head and my heart, and it’s begging to be written.” Christofi succeeds in revealing Dostoyevsky’s personality in ways no ordinary biographical treatment could.