Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life, Christofi Alex

A daring and mesmerizing twist on the art of biography - Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: The Biography

Anyone who loves Dostoevskys] novels will be fascinated by this book - Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

Dostoevskys life was marked by brilliance and brutality. Sentenced to death as a young revolutionary, he survived mock execution and Siberian exile to live through a time of seismic change in Russia, eventually being accepted into the Tsars inner circle. He had three great love affairs, each overshadowed by debilitating epilepsy and addiction to gambling. Somehow, amidst all this, he found time to write short stories, journalism and novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, works now recognised as among the finest ever written.

In Dostoevsky in Love Alex Christofi weaves carefully chosen excerpts of the authors work with the historical context to form an illuminating and often surprising whole. The result is a novelistic life that immerses the reader in a grand vista of Dostoevskys world: from the Siberian prison camp to the gambling halls of Europe; from the dank prison cells of the Tsars fortress to the refined salons of St Petersburg. Along the way, Christofi relates the stories of the three women whose lives were so deeply intertwined with Dostoevskys: the consumptive widow Maria; the impetuous Polina who had visions of assassinating the Tsar; and the faithful stenographer Anna, who did so much to secure his literary legacy.

Reading between the lines of his fiction, Christofi reconstructs the memoir Dostoevsky might have written had life - and literary stardom - not intervened. He gives us a new portrait of the artist as never before seen: a shy but devoted lover, an empathetic friend of the people, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.