Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language: (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

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.

Table of Contents:
Kristeva’s Dostoyevsky: The Arrival of the Human, by Rowan Williams Preface Can You Like Dostoyevsky? Crimes and Pardons The God-Man, the Man-God The Second Sex Outside of Sex Children, Rapes, and Sensual Pleasures Everything Is Permitted Notes Index

About the Author :
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works. Her most recent Columbia University Press book is Passions of Our Time (2019). Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, is the author of many books, including Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (2008). Jody Gladding is a poet who has translated dozens of works from French, including Kristeva’s The Severed Head: Capital Visions (Columbia, 2014).

Review :
Part spiritual autobiography, part free association, Kristeva’s study of Dostoyevsky becomes the occasion for a journey through the life of the mind. In searing harmony with her subject, she once again demonstrates how it is only out of the depths of abjection that human creativity is born. One of her most exuberant and challenging works, Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language offers us Dostoyevsky as lascivious, blasphemous, and saint, taking us into the core of Kristeva’s unique vision. Dostoevsky, as Kristeva’s reminder about language and the sacred helps us guess, loves religious mischief precisely because he cares so much about religious faith. Dostoyevsky scholars will find this worth a look. One need not be a post-structural scholar to appreciate how a reading of Dostoevsky’s many voices can help navigate this world’s 'unresolvable tensions.' Julia Kristeva raises the study of literature to an impressive “meta” level by considering Dostoevsky’s works as explorations of the problem of what language can and cannot represent. Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language was a very interesting read, even if at times baffling or complicated. Kristeva writes intriguingly, and the novel is a lovely depiction of her personal experiences with Dostoyevsky.