Joseph Frank > Quotes

“His unrivaled genius as an ideological novelist was this capacity to invent actions and situations in which ideas dominate behavior without the latter becoming allegorical. He possessed what I call an eschatological imagination, one that could envision putting ideas into action and then following them out to their ultimate consequences. At the same time, his characters respond to such consequences according to the ordinary moral and social standards prevalent in their milieu, and it is the fusion of these two levels that provides Dostoevsky's novels with both their imaginative range and their realistic grounding in social life.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Years later, when Dostoevsky was reading the book of Job once again, he wrote his wife that it put him into such a state of "unhealthy rapture" that he almost cried. "It's a strange thing, Anya, this books is one of the first in my life which made an impression on me; I was then still almost a child." There is an allusion to this revelatory experience of the young boy in The Brothers Karamazov, where Zosima recalls being struck by a reading of the book of Job at the age of eight and feeling that "for the first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God's word in my heart" (9:287). This seed was one day to flower into the magnificent growth of Ivan Karamazov's passionate protest against God's injustice and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, but it also grew into Alyosha's submission to the awesomeness of the infinite before which Job too had once bowed his head, and into Zosima's teaching of the necessity for an ultimate faith in the goodness of God's mysterious wisdom. It is Dostoevsky's genius as a writer to have been able to feel (and to express) both these extremes of rejection and acceptance. While the tension of this polarity may have developed out of the ambivalence of Dostoevsky's psychodynamic relationship with his father, what is important is to see how early it was transposed and projected into the religious symbolism of the eternal problem of theodicy.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849

“On Tolstoy vs. Dostoyevsky: Tolstoy depicted the life “which existed in the stable Moscow landowners’ family of the middle-upper stratum.” Such a life was the life of the exceptions. The life of the majority on the other hand, was one of confusion and moral chaos. Dostoevsky’s work was an attempt to grapple with the chaos of the present, while Tolstoy’s were pious efforts to enshrine for posterity the beauty of a gentry life already vanishing and doomed to extinction.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“The atmosphere of man’s soul is composed of the union of heaven and earth; what an unnatural child man is; the law of spiritual nature is broken… It seems to me that the world has taken on a negative meaning, and that from roof hi, refined spirituality there has emerged satire.”

Dostoyevsky was beginning to think of human life as an eternal struggle between the material in the spiritual in man’s nature; and he would always continue to regard the world as a Purgatory, who's trials and triangulations serve the supreme purpose of more purification.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself—but you just can’t help it.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“If it was his mother who had given birth to him in the flesh, it was Pushkin who had given birth to him in the world of the spirit.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“For the young man from Moscow whose head was filled with thoughts of the beautiful and sublime, the moral mediocrity of his comrade came as a withering disillusionment. And if he had been out raged by the incident of the government courier, one can well imagine his horror of the savagery of the upper classes toward all those to whom they stood in a position of authority.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“And there will come a time – I fervently believe it – when no one will be burned, no one will be decapitated, when the criminal will plead for death… And death will be denied him… When there will be no senseless forms and rites, no contract and stipulations on feeling, no duty and obligation, and we shall not yield to will but to love alone; when there will be no husbands and wives, but lovers and mistresses, and when the mistress comes to the lover saying: ‘I love another,’ the lover will answer: ‘I cannot be happy without you, I shall suffer all my life, but go to him whom you love,’ and will not accept her sacrifice,... but like God, will say to her: I want blessings, not sacrifices… There will be neither rich nor poor, neither kings nor subject, there will be brethren, there will be men, and, at the word of the Apostle Paul, Christ will pass his power to the Father, and Father-Reason will hold sway once more, but this time in a new heaven and above a new world.”

This will be the realisation, as Belinsky rightly says himself, of the dream of “the Golden Age,” and this dream is what Belinsky refers to as “Socialism.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“I have such an awful, repulsive character. Sometimes, when my heart is full of love, you can’t get a kind word out of me. My nerves don’t obey me at such moments. I am ridiculous and disgusting, and I always suffer from the unjust conclusions drawn about me. People say that I am callous and without a heart. I can show that I am a man with a heart and with love only when external circumstances themselves, accidents, jolt me forcibly out of my usual nastiness. Otherwise I am disgusting. I attribute this lack of balance to illness.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see, And let my words be seen and heard By all who turn aside from me. And burn them with my fiery word.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“The suffering of the world, the mystery of the universe, the impulse towards the sublime in love and heroism, the grief and despair over a dreamt of but unattainable beatitude, the hamlet-like visits to cemeteries, the romantic parlour, romantic beards, and romantic haircuts-all these and similar things gave evidence of restive spirits. It was expected and feared that they would join conspiratorial sects and rise with arms in their hand the moment they had the chance.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“[Schelling] viewed art as an organ of metaphysical cognition. The vehicle through which the mysteries of the highest transcendental truths are revealed to mankind.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“The most routine abstract thought,” he wrote, “very often struck him with an uncommon force and would stir him up remarkably. He was, in any case, a person in the highest degree excitable and impressionable. A simple idea, sometimes very familiar and commonplace, would suddenly set him aflame and reveal itself to him in all its significance. He, so to speak, felt thought with unusual liveliness. Then he would state it in various forms, sometimes giving it a very sharp, graphic expression, although not explaining it logically or developing its content” (3: 42). It is this inborn tendency of Dostoevsky to “feel thought” that gives his best work its special stamp, and why it is so important to locate his writings in relation to the evolution of ideas in his lifetime.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Kant explained that the consciousness of good and evil is innate to mankind, written indelibly into the human heart. Earthly life, however, reveals a glaring contradiction: the virtuous in this world, those who choose to live by the good and obey the moral law, are not always the ones who prosper and receive their just reward. But if, as we must assume, the Eternal Creative Mind is rational and beneficent, then we must also assume that this contradiction will not be left unresolved. Hence we postulate the existence of an immortal life after physical death in which the good receive their reward, even though this postulate can never be proven by human reason.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849

“But the romantic dissatisfaction with the limits of earthly life and, in particular, it’s a positive valuation of more suffering always remained a feature of his own world view”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“My brother and I were then longing for a new life, we dreamt about something enormous, about everything beautiful and sublime; such touching words with and still fresh, and a third without irony.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“His period of imprisonment also convinced him that the need for freedom, particularly the sense of being able to exercise one’s free will, was an ineradicable need of the human personality and could express itself even in apparently self-destructive forms if no other outlet were possible. Also, as Dostoevsky wrote himself, the four years he spent in the prison camp were responsible for “the regeneration of [his] convictions” on a more mundane level. This was a result of his growing awareness of the deep roots of traditional Christianity in even the worst of peasant criminals, who bowed down during the Easter service, with a clanking of chains, when the priest read the words “accept me, O Lord, even as the thief.” The basis of Dostoevsky’s later faith in what he considered the ineradicable Christian essence of the Russian people arose from such experiences.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Here Dostoevsky draws what seems to him the moral of the revolutions of 1848, and applies it to the Russian situation... "Every society can accommodate only that degree of progress that it has developed and begun to understand. Why reach further, why reach for the stars in the sky? This can destroy everything because it can frighten everyone.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865

“Crime and Punishment was a response to the ideas of another radical thinker, Dimitry Pisarev, who drew a sharp distinction between the slumbering masses and those superior individuals like Raskolnikov who believed they had a moral right to commit crimes in the interest of humanity. In the end, however, Raskolnikov discovers that his true motive was to test (unsuccessfully) whether he could overcome his Christian conscience to achieve such a goal.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“«En todas las épocas, el hombre busca su autonomía, su libertad y, aunque arrastrado por la necesidad, no quiere actuar sino según su propia voluntad; no quiere ser un sepulturero pasivo del pasado ni una comadrona inconsciente del futuro; considera la historia como su obra libre e indispensable. Cree en su libertad como cree en la existencia del mundo exterior tal como se le presenta, porque confía en sus ojos y porque, sin esa confianza, no podría dar un paso. La libertad moral es, pues, una realidad psicológica o, si se quiere, antropológica».”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoievski: El escritor en su tiempo (Historia y Biografías)

“Pour Schelling, l'art était un instrument de connaissance métaphysique: en réalité l'art était le moyen grâce auquel les mystères des plus hautes vérités transcendantales se révélaient à l'humanité. Toute la génération des années 1840 fut imprégnée de cette foi en la mission métaphysique de l'art, dont Dostoïevski fut le défenseur le plus passionné et le plus éloquent.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoïevski, un écrivain dans son temps (LITTERATURE ETR)

“His period of imprisonment also convinced him that the need for freedom, particularly the sense of being able to exercise one is free will, was an ineradicable need of the human personality and could express itself even in apparently self – destructive forms if no other outlet where possible.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Le génie de Dostoïevski réside dans sa capacité à inventer des situations dans lesquelles les idées dominent les comportements de ses personnages sans que celui-ci devienne allégorique. Il avait ce que j'appelle une "imagination eschatologique", c'est-à-dire une imagination qui lui permettait de transformer les idées en actes, et de les suivre jusqu'à leurs ultimes conséquences. En même temps, ses personnages réagissent à ces conséquences selon les normes morales et sociales dominantes dans leur milieu, et c'est la fusion de ces deux niveaux qui fait toute la richesse de ses romans.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoïevski, un écrivain dans son temps (LITTERATURE ETR)

“Dostoyevsky had come to believe that “to love man like oneself, according to the commandment of Christ, is impossible. The law of personality on Earth binds. The ego stands in the way.” It is only in the afterlife that the “the law of personality” could be decisively overcome.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“A typical Russian Romantic of the 1830's, Shidlovsky was consumed, as they all were, with unappeasable desires that could not be satisfied within the bounds of earthly life. His few extant poems are all expressions of this Romantic malaise, which leads him to melancholy questionings about the meaning of human existence. No answer is ever given to these inquiries, but Shidlovsky is consoled by the belief that there is a God who sometimes vouchsafes his presence in nature and holds out hope of solace to unhappy humans.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849

“Pouchkine était son père spirituel. Pouchkine domina la vie littéraire de Dostoïevski du début à la fin. C'est pour lui, l'idole littéraire de sa jeunesse, que le romancier prit pour la dernière fois la parole en public. En 1880, à l'occasion de l'inauguration du monument Pouchkine, Dostoïevski prononça un discours qui eut un immense retentissement dans toute la Russie.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoïevski, un écrivain dans son temps (LITTERATURE ETR)

“Lamennais’s work is a powerful “new Christian” attack on social injustice”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“His unrivaled genius as an ideological novelist was this capacity to invent actions and situations in which ideas dominate behavior without the latter becoming allegorical.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Mikhailovsky”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

“Ce n'est qu'après de longues années d'épreuves et d'expériences extraordinaires, que Dostoïevski cet influence en art tragique et authentique tempéré par la vie.”
― Joseph Frank, Dostoïevski, un écrivain dans son temps (LITTERATURE ETR)