Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. “Of course, and as usual,” she recalls, “I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed.” Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life—and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted and enraptured by the force of his writing.
In this book, Kristeva embarks on a wide-ranging and stimulating inquiry into Dostoyevsky’s work and the profound ways it has influenced her own thinking. Reading across his major novels and shorter works, Kristeva offers incandescent insights into the potent themes that draw her back to the Russian master: God, otherness, violence, eroticism, the mother, the father, language itself. Both personal and erudite, the book intermingles Kristeva’s analysis with her recollections of Dostoyevsky’s significance in different intellectual moments—the rediscovery of Bakhtin in the Thaw-era Eastern Bloc, the debates over poststructuralism in 1960s France, and today’s arguments about whether it can be said that “everything is permitted.” Brilliant and vivid, this is an essential book for admirers of both Kristeva and Dostoyevsky. It also features an illuminating foreword by Rowan Williams that reflects on the significance of Kristeva’s reading of Dostoyevsky for his own understanding of religious writing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Philosopher Kristeva (Powers of Horror) reflects on her lifelong fascination with Fyodor Dostoyevsky's work in this erudite if academic account. Starting with her childhood obsession with the author, Kristeva asks: "Can you like Dostoyevsky?" before investigating what his writing "tells us about writing itself," as Rowan Williams writes in his introduction. Equal parts literary analysis and psychological pursuit, Kristeva's survey connects the Russian novelist's writing to other thinkers, such as Sigmund Freud, her own mentor Tzvetan Stoyanov, and her father (who discouraged her from reading Dostoyevsky). Kristeva also offers readings of The House of the Dead (which she reads as "the right side out of... the dazzling brilliance of Notes from the Underground"), The Brothers Karamazov (a "metaphysical whodunnit"), and Crime and Punishment (the ending of which she "came close" to finding overrated). Though insightful, Kristeva's work is jargon-heavy ("The scattered corporeal flashes that the novelist grants his characters release their iconic traces in the textual polyphony") in a way that's likely to lose those outside the halls of academia. Still, Dostoyevsky scholars will find this worth a look.