Dostoevsky: A Life

by David Magarshack

Mr. David Magarshack's biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky is based on a mass of material that has become available only recently with the publication of the fourth and final volume of his letters and the latest research into the origins of some of the ideas that are closely associated with Dostoevsky's writings.

Mr. Magarshack's new biography is valuable for giving a careful and unbiased account of Dostoevsky's private life without over-stepping the bounds rational analysis of the latest available data or indulging in the kind of incantatory hero-worship that has become all too common a feature of some recent studies of Dostoevsky.

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

David Magarshack (1899 - 1977) was a Latvian translator and biographer of Russian authors, best known for his translations of Dostoevsky.

Magarshack was born in Riga, in present-day Latvia (Riga was then part of Russia), travelled to Britain in 1920 and became naturalised in 1931.

After graduating from University College London in English Language and Literature, he worked in Fleet Street and published a number of novels.

He was the biographer of Chekhov (1952, 1955 (US)), Gogol (1957), Dostoevsky (1962), Pushkin (1967), Stanislavsky (1951, 1976) and Turgenev (1954). Magarshack died in London in 1977.