Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865

This is the 3rd installment of a five-volume work dealing with the life and writings of Dostoevsky. The time-span covered here (1860-1865) deal with an extremely important period in Dostoevsky's life that has received little attention. In the early 1860s, as editor of two important journals, Dostoevsky stood much more directly at the center of Russian social-cultural life than during the remainder of the decade, when he returned to being exclusively a novelist again and lived abroad in self-imposed isolation. It is also during these years that his social-political outlook was definitively reshaped. It was then that he drew the practical conclusions from the experiences of his Siberian exile. A detailed consideration of these events will help clarify why Dostoevsky came to the conclusions that he did; and it sould also stop the still widespread notion that he emerged from prison campt blindly prepated to support a tyrannical regime of the most vilely reactionary stripe. 395 pages from Princeton University Press.