Ocean State Libraries

In honor of his newly created religion, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy renounces his title, property, and family in favor of poverty and celibacy. For the Countess Sofya, his wife of nearly fifty years, this is the last straw! After she discovers his plans to leave the rights to his iconic novels to the Russian people rather than his own family, she decides to use every trick of seduction in her considerable arsenal, to fight for what she believes is...

This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical...

This fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's justly celebrated literary and cultural biography of Dostoevsky renders with a rare intelligence and grace the last decade of the writer's life, the years in which he wrote A Raw Youth, Diary of a Writer, and his crowning triumph: The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky's final years at last won him the universal approval toward which he had always aspired. While describing his idiosyncratic relationship...

"An intimate new portrait of the bold and determined woman who saved Dostoyevsky's life--and became a pioneer in Russian literary history. In the fall of 1866--against the backdrop of Russia's first feminist movement--an independent-minded young stenographer named Anna Snitkina went to work for a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The volatile and visionary novelist was already a celebrated literary provocateur, yet Anna found him 'terribly...