BIOGRAPHY: Dostoevsky: A Writer in His TimeBy Joseph Frank Princeton, 959pp, £24.95

IN GENEVA, not far from the lake’s edge, is a cemetery with Russian Orthodox crosses. One of the crosses belongs to Fedor Dostoevsky’s daughter “Sophie”, who died in Geneva (according to the inscription) on May 14th, 1868. She was two months old. Dostoevsky was a man who yearned for faith – the Gospels pervaded his Slav soul – yet his daughter’s death could find no part in a divine plan. “Where is Sonya?”, he wailed inconsolably. “To restore her to life I’d accept the torments of crucifixion.” The tragedy served only to aggravate his chronic epilepsy and send him back to the roulette wheel in the hope of a windfall.

But why did Dostoevsky say “Sonya” when the plaque clearly states “Sophie”? Perhaps the girl had been named Sonya, grimly as it turned out, after the doomed heroine of Dostoevsky’s most celebrated novel, Crime and Punishment (1866), but the association became too painful for him to bear, so he changed it posthumously to “Sophie” (or “Sofya” in Russian). Joseph Frank, in his monumental biography of the Russian novelist, leaves the mystery unresolved. Does it matter?

Almost 1,000 pages are devoted to the life of a man who died at the age of 60; under the weight of such detail, Frank's biography is sometimes duller and more prosaic than an account of Dostoevsky's genuinely dramatic life should be. A more pacey chronicle of the writer is to be found in Rowan Williams's recent Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, which investigates the writer's Orthodox faith and tormented Russian messianism. Yet, overall, Frank's is a measured, authoritative and supremely well-written account, as one might expect from a lecturer in Slavic literature at Princeton. Incredibly, the book has been whittled down to one volume from five, and represents at least a feat of judicious selection and abridgement. The first volume, The Seeds of Revolt, appeared as long ago as 1976, and was hailed as a marvel of luminous exposition and scholarship.

For many in the West, Dostoevsky is the most "Russian" of Russian authors. He was born in Moscow, in 1821, to a father who was apparently murdered by his own serfs, leaving the young Fedor with a bewildered awareness of human cruelty. His best-known works – Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov– radiate a dark chaos combined with an often apocalyptic sensibility and they teem with holy fools, saintly prostitutes and dangerous revolutionaries. Raskalnikov (from the Russian raskolnik, "dissenter") introduces a violent ideology of redemption through suffering into Crime and Punishment, which Vladimir Nabokov, for one, found unsavoury. ("Dostoevsky is a third rate writer and his fame is incomprehensible", judged the author of Lolita.)

However, for many other Russians, Dostoevsky remains a quasi-divine figure, whose fiction brilliantly dramatised the struggle between the “pure” Russian heart and the “corrupting” power of Western Europe. Dostoevsky’s Slavophil bias inevitably contained a streak of xenophobia, which surfaced vehemently during the travels he undertook abroad in the 1860s in order to avoid creditors back home. Geneva, typically, was reckoned a “dull, gloomy Protestant town”, while Victorian London represented the “soullessness” and “hard-nosed mercantilism” of capitalist Western life.

Dostoevsky’s discontent with the West stemmed in part from what he saw as the West’s betrayal of Russia’s Christian cause in the 1854-6 Crimean War. During that conflict, France and Britain had sided with the Ottomans against Russia to defend their own imperial interests and thus ensured the “crucifixion of the Russian Christ”. In his discontent, Dostoevsky co-opted even the most European of Russians into his anti-western, Slavophil cause. Among them was the long-dead Pushkin, Russia’s first great writer, whose opposition to Polish independence revealed a pro-Slav bias, Dostoevsky argued, as well as a proud Old Russian imperialism. In later years, this chauvinist tendency endeared Dostoevsky to Stalin’s goons, who tailored his image to Soviet ideology, and recruited his works to stoke East-West antagonisms.

As a young man, Dostoevsky had in fact espoused a quasi-Soviet Socialism which sought to abolish the enslavement of Russia's peasantry and advocated a social activism inspired by the Gospels. In 1849, having graduated in St Petersburg in military engineering, Dostoevsky was arrested by Tsar Nicholas I's secret police and subjected to a gruesome mock-execution, before being deported to Siberia. His 10 years in "non-European" Russia more than ever convinced Dostoevsky that Christ was alive in Russian lands, as even the most degraded of convicts there showed a vocation for penance and redemption. The book that emerged from the Siberian ordeal, The House of the Dead(1861-2), effectively created the Gulag genre in Russia and remains a work of great, unsparing lucidity and documentary verismo.

After Siberia, however, Dostoevsky seemed to court misfortune, free-wheeling to self-destruction through bouts of crippling, untreated epilepsy and an addiction (also untreated) to gambling. His second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, was tolerant of his extravagant ill tempers and tantrums, but disaster struck with the death of their daughter Sophie (or Sonya) in Switzerland. Afterwards the Dostoyevskys took the steamer to Vevey on the other side of Lake Geneva, having pawned their jewellery in order to pay for accommodation.

In spite of its great length, Frank’s biography gives a marvellously clear sense of the man Dostoevsky might have been to meet: alternately belligerent and sweet, physically sickly and sallow. On the author’s politics, moreover, Frank is excellent. Dostoevsky believed in a Church of social action and responsibility, and his Orthodoxy was inseparable from his belief in the redemptive possibilities of the Russian peasant soul. Beneath his moral elevation of the Slav spirit, though, lurked an unpleasant vein of anti-Semitism, which Frank, to his credit, does not flinch from exposing. Dostoevsky’s appetite for affliction and self-torturing asceticism could, moreover, verge on the holier-than-thou (a potential saint can be a very difficult person). Yet the books remain, and these are a monument more durable than bronze. This splendid, one-volume life will be required reading for anyone interested in the genius of “Dusty”, as Nabokov (with a touch of irreverence) nicknamed the star-crossed Russian maestro.

Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award 2003. He is currently working on a history for Faber and Faber of the Baltic city of Tallinn during the second World War