It is titled Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (Princeton University Press, 794 pp., $35). He started out to write a modest book on the novels, but then, as he rather understates the matter, “my initial intention would grow in size and scope.” Decades later, we have the fifth, final, and very big volume of a biography that will be a standard reference for as long as there are people interested in Dostoevsky, which I like to think will be until Our Lord returns in glory. But then-to our good fortune and, I trust, to his gratification-he got interested in Dostoevsky.

He could very well have ended up giving papers at the Modern Language Association on transgressive gendering or other topics of felt academic urgency. After all, he was a professor of comparative literature and understood himself to be a literary critic. The same might have been the case with Joseph Frank. I wrote that, did I? What I wrote is usually not an embarrassment, although there is a touch of awkwardness in not remembering. I am regularly asked by graduate students in search of something or someone to write about what I meant by one thing or another that I wrote ten or twenty or even thirty years ago. I have published, quite literally, millions of words on subjects so various that many, if not most, of them escape recall.

I know for sure that I will never do the monumental thing done by Joseph Frank. Most of the time I think about what might have been not in resentment but in wonder. But it is only in moments of ungrateful rebellion against my creatureliness that I resent the fact that what might have been was not. In deciding for this and then for that, from which followed the other thing, I cut off what might have been. Decisions were made and I’ve never gotten over my first discovery that the word decision is derived from decidere, which means to cut off. Being a creature of time and limited possibilities, no matter how much I’ve done, what I’ve done is so pitiably small, but I choose to believe it was mine to do. When I was young and under the compulsion to affect a deeper experience of life than I had, I was fond of quoting Whittier’s sage-sounding observation that the saddest words of tongue or pen are simply these, “It might have been.” They can be words of profound regret and even bitterness about the roads not taken, but they can also be spoken without sadness in grateful recognition of one’s creatureliness.

Joseph frank's dostoevsky