Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language

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. (Dec.)