Dostoevsky in Love
ALEX CHRISTOFI
(BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM, 256 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

On Christmas Day 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky set off on a four-week sleigh ride to prison in Siberia in temperatures of minus 40 degrees below zero. He had shackles round his legs; he’d just said goodbye to his beloved brother Mikhail and wouldn’t see him for a decade. For the next four years he would eat cockroach soup and sleep on a rotten plank in an icy barrack full of homicidal peasants. Anyone who feels Christmas was below par this year should run to the bookshop and buy this book – though Dostoevsky’s Christmas was actually better than it sounds. He’d been put through a mock execution by firing squad and a last-minute reprieve made life itself seem the greatest gift imaginable. “My life begins again today … I have my heart and flesh and blood which can also love and suffer and desire and remember, and this after all is life.” The grit and resilience he showed in the rest of his difficult life must surely have been seared into him by that rebirth and harsh sojourn in Siberia.