Great musicians, it is said, do not choose their calling—music chooses them. Reading and rereading Joseph Frank’s writings after his passing, it seems that the spirit of modernity itself chose him to be its voice among literary critics—in the age when brute force remaking the world was matched and animated by a titanic struggle of ideas.
How else to explain, then, that Frank’s debut in Scholastic, bore an impossible title, one he used to chuckle about, “Prolegomena to All Future Literary Criticism”? The year was 1935. Frank was seventeen and an orphan. He had lost his father (Glassman) when he was five; Frank, his stepfather, who adopted him and his younger brother Walter and with whom he lived in a wealthy Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, died when he was a teenager; soon thereafter, he lost his mother, Jennifer Frank (née Garlick). Somewhere on the Lower East Side of New York, there was still his Yiddish-speaking grandmother, who was taking care of Walter, but Joseph was already on his own, finishing Erasmus Hall High School and preparing to enter New York University.
A mere decade later, while he worked as a reporter for the Bureau of National Affairs, came entry into the big leagues: “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Three Parts.” His last book, Responses to Modernity, with a telling subtitle Essays in the Politics of Culture, was published just a few months before illness claimed him. In between, there are almost three hundred essays and reviews, some in French, and a monumental biography of a Russian writer whose fictional characters come alive even as they reenact the metaphysical mystery play of the modern era.
Even Frank’s stutter that he struggled with all his life (but this writer remembers with fondness) looks in retrospect like a mark of election. The affliction struck a child who was born with an extraordinary aesthetic talent and a gift for empathy. It forced him to develop, while still in his teens, a powerful voice as a writer of critical prose. Authoritative and subtle, uncompromising yet forgiving, the voice was so resonant and expressive that had Hollywood come calling, it would have taken an Orson Welles (with the strut of John Wayne) to have filled the bill. The force of this voice is already present in his “Dedication to Thomas Mann,” published in the NYU student journal in 1937; it is undiminished in “Thinkers and Liars,” one of his last pieces in The New Republic about Eliade, Cioran, and Ionesco, and it reverberates throughout his entire Dostoevsky pentateuch, the five volumes of his unsurpassed biography of the great Russian author and prophet.
Frank’s own writer’s voice was the Aaron to his Moses, except that it was inflected with a natural aesthetic intelligence and its corollary—empathy. The world picture that this voice invoked was complex and “impure” in the same way that a poem for T.S. Eliot, as Frank once wrote assessing Eliot’s critical legacy, had to “preserve some ‘impurity’,” if it was to be humanly meaningful.” It took Joseph Frank to fish out a statement out of T.S. Eliot to highlight the poet’s genius while showing that Eliot’s politics, which Frank despised, went contrary to the poet’s own aesthetic intuition. What better illustration can there be of the Underground Man’s conviction that two and two never add up to four.
As a critic, Frank entered the fray in the mid-1930s, when the world was rent by a clash among the all-too-imperfect democracies and the perfection-mongering regimes of Communism and Fascism. Like many in his generation, he appreciated Marx and identified with the Popular Front politics, but up to a point. As Frank recalled later, a close friend of his, the son of a prominent Menshevik, provided him with unvarnished accounts of what was going on in the USSR. This was a factor in Frank’s reluctance to join the CP USA, and he stayed out even though many of his friends counted themselves among its members.
Nevertheless, when his NYU professor of English Samuel Sillen, then the book review editor for New Masses and a recent convert to communism, invited Frank to review books for the journal, Frank did not demur and became a regular reviewer for a communist magazine, though one that was not directly controlled by the party. His first review appeared in March 1 issue of New Masses in 1938. The journal was then at the peak of its circulation and attracted some of the most prominent names in American letters (among the book reviewers were Kenneth Burke, Philip Rahv, Theodore Draper, and another of Frank’s NYU English professors, Edwin Berry Burgum). What was decisive for Frank, however, was the journal’s unequivocal anti-fascist and anti-Nazi stand, then central to the agenda of the Popular Front. In this regard and up to the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, New Masses contrasted favorably with the isolationism of much of the American press, including the left-wing The Partisan Review and The New Republic.
By the end of 1938, however, unhappy though he was with existing order of American capitalism, Frank broke with his Red book-review outlet. His last piece came out on the November 29, 1938. There may have been other factors that precipitated the break, but the change of mind was prompted, no doubt, by his studies with another of his NYU instructors, the strongly anti-communist philosopher Sidney Hook and, perhaps even more meaningful for Frank, the course he took with the American historian Henry Bumford Parkes, the author of Marxism: An Autopsy (1939). Along with them, Frank found prescriptive Marxism dead, its historical calculus—the ends justifying the means—odious, and its sacrifice of the arts on the altar of political expediency, unacceptable. Russia, the birthplace of Dostoevsky and Lenin, now ruled by Stalin, was Exhibit One on both counts, as was, of course, Nazi Germany.
Parkes’ Marxism: An Autopsy, which offered both a profound critique of Marxism and a vaguely socialist statist program for humanizing capitalism, became a vehicle for Frank’s profession of a new and liberal social and philosophical creed. It offered “An Economic Basis for Liberal Values,” as Frank called his long and sympathetic review of the book. When it became clear that New York’s publishing venues were uninterested in his change of direction, Frank turned toward the South where Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, two Southern Agrarians, lent him a sympathetic ear.
Frank’s review essay of Marxism: An Autopsy was published early in 1942, in the last issue of Southern Review to come out during the war years. By then, Frank, exempted from military service because of his severe stutter, was already busing books at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he relocated for personal reasons. While there, he proceeded with his education, if under informal circumstances, with, among others, philosopher David Baumgardt, then a consultant for the Library of Congress, whom he befriended in the Library stacks. The former holder of the Hegel Chair at the University of Berlin and an expert of Franz von Baader and Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, Baumgardt became Frank’s informal intellectual history tutor and introduced him to a circles of other exile intellectuals from Nazi Germany, who were then residing in Washington, D.C.
The entry into this circle allowed Frank to continue his informal studies of great continental writers and thinkers. Soon he was hired—on the strength of his Southern Review publication—as a labor reporter by the Bureau of National Affairs. At the BNA, he had to turn out copy on a weekly basis, explaining in plain English the complex new regulations and statutes then being issued by the Roosevelt Administration. The work was challenging, Frank was good at it, and before long, he was promoted to editor. Remembering this almost decade-long stint at the BNA (1942-50), Frank thought of it as enormously valuable for his growth as a writer.
By the time “Spatial Form in Modern Literature, An Essay in Three Parts,” appeared in Sewanee Review in 1945, Frank’s critical stance had been fully formed: it combined the intellectual tradition of Western liberalism, including a search for social justice and thus elements of Marx, with a commitment to abiding ethical and aesthetic values, rooted in Western individualism, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and, significant for Frank, modern literature and art. As an autonomous sphere of human activity, modern art had as much to say about the human condition as religion, politics, philosophy, and economics. A historical-materialist conception of art, went the main thesis in “Spatial Form,” missed the very essence of modernism, namely the spatial remolding of human experience in time in all of its moral, aesthetic, and existential complexity.
“Spatial Form” thus echoed “The Economic Basis of Liberal Values,” providing, in a manner of speaking, a aesthetic basis for the expression of liberal, humanistic values in literary criticism. In Frank’s critical imagination, the disparate, sometimes mutually exclusive, elements of the world picture are bound together by his unstinting belief in the power of art and ideas, coupled with his instinctive humanity—appreciation for human suffering, frailty, and contingency—the very pathos of the sculpture Laocoön and his Sons, so important for “Spatial Form,” or the condensed colloquialism of “pity for man” in Dostoevsky. Lack of this “pity for man” was unforgivable. “It is unseemly,” Frank once chided an historian and a biographer whose work he admired, “even for a social psychologist to kick a man when he is down.”
Frank’s magnum opus on Dostoevsky was thus preordained, indeed overdetermined. Already in college Frank was “really passionate about Dostoevsky,” as his NYU professor Sidney Hook remarked to him, then a young book review contributor of New Masses, after a class discussion. Then came his critique of Marxism, his post-war immersion in French Existentialism, his admiration for Albert Camus, whose side he took in the famous Camus-Sartre polemic, and the realization of the deep ideological and aesthetic kinship between one of Russia’s great writers and the most recent iteration of the clash of ideas precipitated by modernity. In 1948, Frank was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to go to France. He spent two years there, attending the Sorbonne where, among other subjects, he studied Hegel with Jean Hyppolite, but most important for him, appearing regularly at the informal Collège philosophique, founded by Jean Wahl, where he met his future wife and life-long intellectual interlocutor, the mathematician Marguerite Straus. It was there, at the Collège philosophique, an informal discussion group that included Alexandre Koyré that Marguerite introduced him to, and the cafes and caves of St. Germaine-des-Prés, that the ideas animating European politics since the dawn of modernity were once again coming alive and resonating with the early salvos of cold war.
In those days in Paris, Dostoevsky loomed ever larger: from Albert Camus’s oft-repeated debt to the great novelist to the explosive popularity of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a self-consciously Dostoevskian indictment of Marxist dialectic, that sold half a million copies in France in the two years since its controversial publication there in 1945. No surprise then that the subject of Frank’s first Gauss Lecture at Princeton University in 1955 was “Existentialism and Dostoevsky.” And the association is further reinforced in his doctoral dissertation he wrote for the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, “Dostoevsky and Russian Nihilism: A Context for Notes from The Underground” (University of Chicago. 1960).
Frank’s “Dostoevsky,” however, evolved, not just into a scholarly study of the writer’s thought or device, but after a long germination into a full-fledged critical biography. What was to be volume one of the five-volume sequence came out in 1976 after two decades of teaching as professor of comparative literature and director of the Christian Gauss Seminars Criticism at Princeton University. A genre as capacious as the novel, biography allows one to embrace historical context, ideas, psychology, along with all manner of human contingency. And just as for Dostoevsky, his novels recapitulated his own commitments and dramatized the ideological and metaphysical conflicts of his age, so for Frank, his biography of the great Russian was called forth by Frank’s own life, his own commitments, and the historical struggles of his own age. Neither author turned toward fiction and biography by accident: for both, only art (and critical biography is the novel’s closest cousin) was capable of giving these disparate elements a coherent and human form.
Reading Frank’s Dostoevsky is to hear the challenge and response of two giants, towering like sentinels, each over his own century. No better tribute for a critic is possible. This is how, then, to borrow a phrase from Frank’s Idea of Spatial Form, “the time world of history becomes transmuted into the timeless world of myth” or to paraphrase W.H. Auden, a great man of letters becomes his admirers. The mark that Joseph Frank’s legacy left on the study of Russian literature and culture in the larger Euro-American context is deep and indelible.
https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/critic-his-life-his-age-tribute-joseph-frank-1918-2013
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Dostoevsky’s Conversion: Joseph Frank (1983)
No period of Dostoevsky’s life is more mysterious and enigmatic than the four long years that he spent in the prison camp at Omsk between 1850 and 1854. Everyone is aware—and of course, Dostoevsky said so himself—that these years produced a profound “transformation of his convictions” which reshaped his ideas and values for the remainder of his life. He had gone into exile as a determined opponent of the regime of Nicholas I, sentenced for having taken part in a revolutionary conspiracy aimed at eliminating serfdom. But the post-Siberian Dostoevsky, just a few years after his return from exile, became for the remainder of his life one of the most determined and effective opponents of Russian radical ideology. And it was this opposition—transposed to a metaphysical level, and exploring the ultimate moral foundations of modern culture—that provided the inspiration for his greatest works.
It is one of the most striking aspects of the abundant material available about these years that Dostoevsky never gets any farther than referring to the fact that such a transformation has taken place. Not once does he ever say anything, except in the vaguest terms, that would help us to grasp the nature of what occurred; not once does he make any attempt to illuminate the complex of causes, both psychic and cultural, that impelled his conversion from one set of beliefs to another. This lack of what might be called ideological specificity is characteristic, not only of The House of the Dead (where it might be attributed to a fear of the censorship), but of Dostoevsky’s correspondence as well, even though some of it was sent by personal courier to people like his brother Mikhail with whom he was accustomed to speak freely.
No one, so far as I am aware, has remarked on this curious reticence of Dostoevsky, the great psychologist of the power of ideas, to make any attempt at depicting the inner process of this epochal event in his own life. Once or twice in his letters, to be sure, Dostoevsky approaches the brink of such a self-analysis and self-avowal; but he always retreats at the very last moment. “But my soul, heart, mind—what has grown, what has ripened, what has been discarded together with the weeds, that can’t be communicated and set down on a sheet of paper…. In general, prison has taken away many things from me and brought many others.” This is as far as he chooses to go in baring the secrets of his soul; and it leaves the curious reader more baffled than enlightened…
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/01/20/dostoevskys-conversion/
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Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky scholar (1918-2013) – By Matt Schudel
Joseph Frank, a long-time professor of literature whose five-volume biography of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is considered a landmark of historical and literary scholarship, died Feb. 27 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 94. He had pulmonary failure, according to the New York Times, which first reported his death.
Dr. Frank wrote on a wide range of literary subjects before he began to focus on Dostoevsky — the author of “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot” and “The Brothers Karamazov” — in the 1950s. Dr. Frank learned Russian and immersed himself in the turbulent milieu of Dostoevsky’s life — he lived from 1821 to 1881 — to write what some scholars have called an incomparable portrait of the author’s life and times. From 1976 to 2002, Dr. Frank chronicled Dostoevsky’s dramatic life in five volumes that totaled more than 2,400 pages. “No other scholar, in Russia or the West, comes close to Frank’s command of the literary, political and philosophical context in which the great Russian writer lived and worked,” Orlando Figes, a British historian of Russia, wrote in London’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper in 2002. Dr. Frank came to Dostoevsky while preparing a series of lectures on existential themes in literature and never turned back.
Dostoevsky came from a land-owning family, became active in radical literary and political circles and began writing in the 1840s. He was arrested in 1849 and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved at the last minute. He spent four years in a labor camp in Siberia and another six at a remote army outpost near the Chinese border before returning to the mainstream of Russian life in St. Petersburg. His writings about madness, murder, the downtrodden and the struggle of good against evil have influenced writers and young people for more than a century.
“Frank’s originality,” Harvard professor Donald Fanger wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2002, “lies in the way he manages to chart, at the same time, the evolution of Dostoevsky the man, of Dostoevsky the writer, of the writings themselves and — perhaps most original — of the changing times that did so much to shape all three.” In a characteristically vivid passage from the second volume of his biography (“Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859”), Dr. Frank described a scene from Dostoevsky’s years as a prisoner:
“Almsgiving from the population reached a peak during the religious holidays; but it was continual all through the year, and sometimes took the form of money handed to the convicts as they shuffled through the streets of Omsk in a work convoy. The first time Dostoevsky received alms in this way was ‘soon after my arrival in prison.’ A ten-year-old girl — the daughter of a young soldier, who had seen Dostoevsky in the army hospital when she came to visit her dying father — passed him walking under escort and ran back to give him a coin.”
Dr. Frank condensed his five-volume biography into a single 959-page book in 2009. But as early as 1977, after only one volume had been published, critic Hilton Kramer wrote in the New York Times, “We know at once that we are in the presence of something special among the literary biographies of our time.”
Joseph Nathaniel Frank was born Oct. 6, 1918, in New York City and attended New York University in the 1930s and the University of Wisconsin in the early 1940s. He never received a bachelor’s degree. He published stories and critical essays in the 1930s and wrote widely on literary matters early in his career. His subjects included Henry James, French writers and modern literature in general.
“I cannot remember a time when I was not writing,” he said in 1986. From 1942 to 1950, he lived in Washington and worked as an editor at the Bureau of National Affairs, a publisher of newsletters and other information about government and business. In 1945, he published an influential three-part essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” that made him well known as a literary critic.
He studied at the University of Paris on a Fulbright fellowship in 1950-51, then went to the University of Chicago, where he received a doctorate in 1960. Dr. Frank taught at the University of Minnesota and New Jersey’s Rutgers University before joining the Princeton faculty in 1966. In 1985, he moved on to Stanford University.
Survivors include his wife of 59 years, Marguerite Straus Frank of Palo Alto; two daughters; a brother; and two grandchildren. Dr. Frank wrote and edited several books on other literary topics, but his career became entwined with Dostoevsky’s life, and his biography was considered a model of deep research, balanced judgment and measured expression. It was, as literary critic James Wood wrote in the New Republic in 2002, “obviously one of the great, clarifying intellectual adventures of the age.”
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The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool: Madhavan Palat’s lecture on Dostoevsky
Madhavan Palat: Forms of Union – Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (1991)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival. By Madhavan Palat
Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia
After the truth-shower 