Joseph Frank's Award-winning, Five-volume Dostoevsky Is Widely Recognized As The Best Biography Of The Writer In Any Language--and One Of The Greatest Literary Biographies Of The Past Half-century. Now Frank's Monumental, 2500-page Work Has Been Skillfully Abridged And Condensed In This Single, Highly Readable Volume With A New Preface By The Author. Carefully Preserving The Original Work's Acclaimed Narrative Style And Combination Of Biography, Intellectual History, And Literary Criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer In His Time Illuminates The Writer's Works--from His First Novel Poor Folk To Crime And Punishment And The Brothers Karamazov--by Setting Them In Their Personal, Historical, And Above All Ideological Context. More Than A Biography In The Usual Sense, This Is A Cultural History Of Nineteenth-century Russia, Providing Both A Rich Picture Of The World In Which Dostoevsky Lived And A Major Reinterpretation Of His Life And Work.