Joseph Frank was professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford and Princeton. The five volumes of his Dostoevsky biography won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, two James Russell Lowell Prizes, and two Christian Gauss Awards, and have been translated into numerous languages. Marina Brodskaya is a translator who worked with Joseph Frank while teaching at Stanford. Her translations include Five Plays by Chekhov. Marguerite Frank, a published mathematician who holds a PhD from Harvard, was married to Joseph Frank from 1953 until his death. Robin Feuer Miller is the Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities and professor of Russian and comparative literature at Brandeis University.

"In chapters on Poor Folk, The Double, The House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, Frank distills his multivolume biography’s provocative and superbly argued readings. . . . The best approach, in Frank’s view, is first to locate Dostoevsky’s fiction and ideas within his immediate concerns, and only then proceed, from the ground up rather than from generalities down, to consider their broader implications. These lectures do that especially well."---Gary Saul Morson, New York Review of Books

Joseph Frank was professor emeritus of Slavic and comparative literature at Stanford and Princeton. The five volumes of his Dostoevsky biography won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, two James Russell Lowell Prizes, and two Christian Gauss Awards, and have been translated into numerous languages. Marina Brodskaya is a translator who worked with Joseph Frank while teaching at Stanford. Her translations include Five Plays by Chekhov. Marguerite Frank, a published mathematician who holds a PhD from Harvard, was married to Joseph Frank from 1953 until his death. Robin Feuer Miller is the Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities and professor of Russian and comparative literature at Brandeis University.

"In chapters on Poor Folk, The Double, The House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, Frank distills his multivolume biography’s provocative and superbly argued readings. . . . The best approach, in Frank’s view, is first to locate Dostoevsky’s fiction and ideas within his immediate concerns, and only then proceed, from the ground up rather than from generalities down, to consider their broader implications. These lectures do that especially well."---Gary Saul Morson, New York Review of Books