At the founding editor’s invitation in 1991–92, the members of the editorial board and the department editors of Common Knowledge wrote individual and small-group calls for papers to be published in the inaugural issue of Spring 1992 and the succeeding issue, Fall 1992. This call for papers was published among the second group.

'En nu zeggen de mensen, om me te troosten, dat ik nog meer kinderen zal krijgen. Maar waar is Sonja? Waar is dat kleine mensje voor wie ik me zou laten kruisigen als zij daarmee het leven zou herkrijgen? Maar ik zal hiermee ophouden; mijn vrouw huilt.'.

Dostojevski-biograaf Frank schrijft over de worsteling van Dostojevski met de traditie van het antisemitisme in zijn vaderland. Hij gaat in op de achtergrond van Dostojevski's verhouding tot de joden en op zijn uitlatingen in zijn Dagboek van een schrijver.

‘Men kan, en dat doe ik zeker, persoonlijk van mening verschillen inzake veel van de sociaal-politieke keuzes die Dostojevski tijdens zijn leven maakte, met name in het latere deel van zijn carrière. Als journalist ontwikkelde hij zijn eigen idealistisch geformuleerde versie, opgetuigd met christelijke verwijzingen, van wat in feite Russisch imperialisme was. Maar niettemin staat vast dat zijn romans enorm hebben bijgedragen aan het levend houden van de ‘idealen van de mens’, in elk geval in de vormen die eigen zijn (...) aan de westerse cultuur, op een manier die slechts weinig andere schrijvers van zijn en onze tijd kunnen evenaren.’. (shrink)

Is de literair aantrekkelijke beschrijving van het kwaad een prikkel om zelf ook kwaad te doen, of kan het ook afschrikwekkend werken? Het antwoord van de auteur is niet eenduidig en laat in het midden of een schrijver verantwoordelijk is voor de uitwerking van zijn geschriften.

Zelfs in het bepaald somber stemmende werk van Dostojevski is nog een sprankje hoop te ontdekken: het geluk van een nieuwe vader bij de geboorte van zijn eerste kind.

In this memorial essay on Sir Frank Kermode (1919–2010), the author focuses on his own exchange of views with Kermode during the 1970s. In Kermode's book The Sense of an Ending (1966), he had criticized Frank's essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945) as part of a larger critique of what the Romantic-Symbolist tradition of English poetry had become in the twentieth century. Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and other late Symbolists had turned artists into advocates of an irrational wisdom superior to (...) reason and common sense, thus isolating—so Kermode argued—the world of art from that of ordinary human concerns. Rejecting their view of art, he turned instead to a pre-Romantic tradition (including Spenser and Milton) that the Symbolists had rejected. Among modern writers, Kermode turned to Wallace Stevens, who became his foil for Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, as well as the most important influence on his own later thinking. Joseph Frank, in this essay, recalls the combination of acerbic intelligence, social concern, gentility, and finally friendship that characterized his debate over these questions with Kermode. Frank recalls as an indication of his respect and admiration for Kermode that he wrote, in 1977, that, even if his own theory of spatial form were to be shown worthless, it would still have value in having provided some of the stimulus for Kermode to write The Sense of an Ending. (shrink)

De twee lofredenaren voor Poesjkin tijdens diens huldiging waren Toergenjev en Dostojevski. De eerste zette de dichter in het kader van de Europese literatuur van zijn dagen. Dostojevski, de slavofiel, kroonde Poesjkin als de eerste, die de Russische ziel onsterfelijk bezongen had.

Joseph Frank zag onlangs in een Parijs theater het weinig opgevoerde toneelstuk Esther van Racine. Esther is gebaseerd op het gelijknamige bijbelboek dat handelt over de afwending van een genocide die het joodse volk bedreigt. In zijn essay verklaart hij de schokkende actualiteit en de enorme indruk die deze opvoering op hem maakte.

My own contribution relates to twentieth-century literature, where "spatialization" enters so fundamentally into the very structure of language and the organization of narrative units that, as [Frank] Kermode is forced to concede, "Frank says quite rightly that a good deal of modern literature is designed to be apprehended thus." His deals with the literature of the past, where "spatialization" was still the tendency which had by no means yet emerged in as radical a manner as in modernity. Both may be (...) seen, and should be seen, as part of a unified theory which has the inestimable advantage of linking experimental modernism with the past in an unbroken continuity, and in viewing the present, not as a break, but rather as a limit-case, an intensification and accentuation of potentialities present in literature almost from the start. One of Kermode's essential aims, in The Sense of an Ending, was precisely to argue in favor of continuity and to reject the schismatic notion that a clean break with the past was either desirable or possible. It seems to me that he succeeded better than he knew, and that in polemicizing with spatial form" he merely perpetuates a schism which the deeper thrust of his own ideas has done much to reveal as nugatory and obsolete. Joseph Frank is professor of comparative literature and director of the Christian Gauss seminars in criticism at Princeton University. His many important contributions include The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature and Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, for which he received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA. (shrink)

It is obvious that the closer the structure of a narrative conforms to causal-chronological sequence, the closer it corresponds to the linear-temporal order of language. It is now equally obvious, however, that such correspondence is contrary to the nature of narrative as an art form. Indeed, it is clear that all through the history of the novel a tension has existed between the linear-temporal nature of its medium and the spatial elements required by its nature as a work of art. (...) Most of what are known as the "formal conventions" of the novel are an implicit agreement between writer and reader not to pay attention to this disjunction and to overlook the extent to which it exists. Shklovsky provocatively called Tristram Shandy the most "typical" novel in world literature because it "laid bare" all the conventions, whose nature as conventions had become imperceptible through long familiarity, employed by the form. Joseph Frank, professor of comparative literature and director of the Christian Gauss seminars in criticism at Princeton University, received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA for Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, the first volume of his four-volume biography. Frank's original article on spatial form in modern literature appeared in Sewanee Review ; the essay was later revised and incorporated in his The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. (shrink)

Essays probe the culture that spawned the great novels of Dostoevsky and explore the author's influence on world literature.