Review: "Fyodor Dostoevsky"

Biography is fiction.  It is not possible to know what really happened in all its detail, much less what was really said in conversation among people – except to the extent that diaries and letters and others writing exist, and even those are questionable, as they come from the skewed perspective of the writer.

That being said, I have just read Peter Leithart’s Fyodor Dostoevsky, and it is amazing!  Leithart has taught Dostoevsky for many years at New St. Andrew’s College, and here takes his pen to write a short (175 page) biography, written in a unique and compelling style – making it a fast, though deep read.

Leithart writes the biography as a series of dialogs – alternating between Dostoevsky and his friend Apollon Maikov late in Dostoevsky’s life and with vignettes of dialog concerning significant events in Dostoevsky’s life.  This is not just whole cloth:  Leithart – as one can see in the footnotes – has spent much time combing through the diaries of Dostoevsky and his wife, Anna, as well as Dostoevsky’s novels.

One read these dialogs and gets to know the man – the brilliant writer, chronically ill man, political unifier, troubled gambler, devotee of family, and passionate Christian.  Turning from respect to sorrow to disgust to awe to – desiring to go back and reread what I have read and read more of Dostoevsky – this is a première biography and introduction to the man and his thought.

If you want to know something about Dostoevsky as a whole man or want to know how to be a real, but human-all-too-human, follower of Christ – pick up and read.

[This review appears on Amazon.com and on my blog.  I received this book for free from Thomas Nelson for this review.]