Dostoevsky in Love

A wonderfully readable account of one of the great, and difficult, figures in world literature, Dostoevsky in Love brings the subject brilliantly to life. Anyone who loves his novels will be fascinated by this book.

A wonderfully readable account of one of the great, and difficult, figures in world literature, Dostoevsky in Love brings the subject brilliantly to life. Anyone who loves his novels will be fascinated by this book.

Christofi immerses us in the forcefield of Dostoevsky’s thought … Beautifully crafted and realised, but it is the great love that Christofi feels for his subject that makes this such a moving book.

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.

A wonderfully written life of Dostoevsky, in which the boundaries that conventionally separate biography and autobiography are dissolved to revelatory effect.

Combining equal parts fact and fiction with literary flair, Alex Christofi has crafted in Dostoevsky in Love a stunning, genre-bending work certain to captivate fans of Dostoevsky and the Russian classics. A daring and mesmerizing twist on the art of biography.

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.

A fierce account of Dostoevsky’s inner and outer life … Christofi’s rapidly unrolling tapestry helps to capture the madcap, tumbling and ferocious quality of Dostoevsky’s style

Innovative biography ... The sociopolitical ferment of Russia bubble[s] up through Mr Christofi’s pages

Fluently readable and warmly entertaining

[A] compelling portrait of the writer’s inner world … Christofi reminds us how much Dostoevsky’s own failings and endless remorse informed his work and shaped his characters. My only caveat is that this lively account is too short.

An immersive and visceral journey through the life of the revolutionary author … [ Dostoevsky in Love ] feels like a cinematic thriller with one of those protagonists that you want to grasp by the shoulders and shake.

An utterly charming, lively and original work that reads like a novel itself.

…qualities which we ascribe to [Dostoevsky’s] unforgettable fictional characters, were all to be found in “Fyodor” himself and Christofi describes them with warmth and understanding.

In Dostoevsky in Love , Alex Christofi managed to pack the life and works into just two hundred understated pages.

Crafted with novelistic skill, it is a book to fit the vast complexity of the man and his work.

Christofi collages fragments from the fiction and journals to explore Dostoevsky’s three great love affairs. The result, a meticulously sourced, semi-novelistic “biography”, is both immersive and extraordinary.

...I don’t think I’ve ever read a biography quite like it. Christofi…combines traditional factual accounts, quotes from personal letters, and excerpts from Dostoevsky’s fiction…to form a unique kind of memoir, immersive, believable and emotionally engaging…I found the experience extremely enjoyable and oddly moving…This book is full of [Dostoevsky’s] compassion and humanity, while revealing the same qualities in his worthy biographer.

…Christofi creates a kind of speculative memoir, part juicy information, part romantic guesswork. For me it worked beautifully, being both unexpectedly moving…and an exciting, unpredictable page-turner.

Christofi pieces together all of these elements of Dostoevsky’s dramatic life with great skill and clarity … If you have read only smaller portions of Dostoevsky, Christofi’s account will send you off to look for more. And, if you have never read this giant of Russian and World Literature, Dostoevsky in Love will send you off to start a great literary experience with a master of the written word.

An original, riveting work.

A fluent, enthralling gallop through a chaotic and painful life … The driving force here is Christofi’s sense that Dostoevsky speaks to our time as never before.

In this probing life study, Christofi illuminates the formative power of the great novelist’s passionate love … Literary scholarship laudably synthesizing insightful analysis with emotional empathy.

Christofi succeeds in revealing Dostoyevsky’s personality in ways no ordinary biographical treatment could.

Winningly brisk … by the end … you feel you know pretty well the texture of his life and the rhythm of his obsessions.

Both an illuminating literary biography and an evocative snapshot of the context in which the great writer created his enduring work ... Dostoevsky fans are certain to find this book insightful and captivating.

Dostoevsky: An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi is a study in precision and counterfactual scholarship that draws heavily upon Dostoevsky’s letters, notebooks, journalism and fiction without missing out on anything of substance.

Alex Christofi is Editorial Director at Transworld Publishers and author of three books published in 12 languages, including the novels Let Us Be True and Glass , winner of the Betty Trask Prize for fiction. He has written for numerous publications including the Guardian , London Magazine , White Review and the Brixton Review of Books , and contributed an essay to the anthology What Doesn't Kill You: Fifteen Stories of Survival. Dostoevsky in Love , his first work of non-fiction, was shortlisted for the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and named as a Literary Non-fiction Book of the Year by the Times and Sunday Times .

alexchristofi.com / @alex_christofi