The personal letters of any great personality tempt the biographer - or even the casual eavesdropper - to intrude unhindered into what is expected to be the most private and most revealing utterances pertaining to that person' career. Such epistles may nonetheless conceal or distort more than they disclose of the author's motives and intentions inasmuch as the writer may project a calculated image.
Not so in the case of Fyodor Dostoyesky's voluminous correspondence, says Stanford's Joseph Frank, who along with the late David Goldstein edited the newly released Selected Letters of Dostoyevsky, of which seven of the most remarkable and significant are excerpted in the following pages. Dostoyevsky lived and worked all his life under such continuous pressure that he considered letters, most of which he wrote on the spur of the moment, as a waste and an intrusion. True, he knew well enough the use of letters as an art form, as he demonstrated brilliantly in his novel Poor Folk, written in the form of an exchange of letters, but his private correspondence seems less contrived and more demanded by the crises - political, financial, and medical - that pounded his life with the regularity of ocean surf.
As a result, his letters, read as a whole, make available his true self much more so than those of writers who had the time and self-conscious intention to hone their images for their correspondents. The new collection represents the first comprehensive, annotated selection that gives an overview of his career and personal circumstances and includes many letters that are made available in English in their entirety for the first time.
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