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Books Sandwiched In: Virtual Author Talks at Noon

Alex Christofi - Dostoevsky in Love

Alex Christofi joins us to discuss his new book, Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life.

Join us on Zoom using this link: https://zoom.us/j/97307011708

This event will also stream live on our Facebook page.

For more information contact Isaac Shub at ishub@nhfpl.org or 203-946-8130, ext. 200.

Alex Christofi lives in South London. In addition to working as Editorial Director at Transworld Publishers, Alex writes occasional essays, reviews, and other short pieces, which have been published in the Guardian, New Humanist, Prospect, The White Review, The Brixton Review of Books and The London Magazine.

His books have been translated into nine languages. He has published two novels, Glass (2015) and Let Us Be True (2017). The former was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Betty Trask Prize. His new book, Dostoevsky in Love (Bloomsbury, 2021), is an intimate biography of the writer and his relationships.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

‘A wonderfully written life of Dostoevsky, in which the boundaries that conventionally separate biography and autobiography are dissolved to revelatory effect.’ – Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

‘Whether you know everything or nothing about Dostoevsky, whether you love or hate him (and he was extremely annoying), this is the perfect modern biography. A celebration of human complexity which fuses surprising new information about the life of the writer with a passionate love for his books. Alex Christofi has created the most charismatic and engaging portrait of a tortured, brilliant man. Dostoevsky In Love is as entertaining as it is insightful.’ – Viv Groskop, author of The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature

‘Alex Christofi has created a dazzling hybrid, a narrative account of Dostoevsky’s life that blends the known facts with his letters and the most autobiographical elements of his fiction. The effect is like that of colourised film footage: the Dostoevsky that shambles through these pages possesses an immediacy and a realness that’s almost uncanny.’ – Chris Power, author of Mothers

Dostoevsky’s 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 Tsar’s 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 recognized as among the finest ever written.

In Dostoevsky in Love, Alex Christofi weaves carefully chosen excerpts of the author’s work with the historical context to form an illuminating and accessible whole. The result is a novelistic life that immerses the reader in a grand vista of Dostoevsky’s Russia: from the Siberian prison camp to the gambling halls of Europe; from the dank prison cells of the Tsar’s 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 Dostoevsky’s: 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 himself 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, a friend of the people capable of great empathy, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.

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