Julia Kristeva has been both attracted and repelled by Dostoyevsky since her youth. In this extraordinary book, by turns poetic and intensely personal, she brings her unique critical sensibility to bear on the tormented and visionary Russian author.
Kristeva ranges widely across Dostoyevsky’s novels and his journalism, plunging deep into the great works—and many of the smaller ones—to investigate her fascination with the Russian author. What emerges is a luminous vision of the writer’s achievements, seen in a wholly new way through Kristeva’s distinctive perspective on language. With her keen psychoanalytical eye, she offers brilliant insights into the passionate heroines of the great novels. Focusing on Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic writing, Kristeva also demonstrates the importance of Orthodox Christianity throughout his body of work, analyzing the complex ways his carnivalesque theology informs his fiction and commentary.
An original and profound interpretation of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest writers, this book’s insights are also relevant to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—up to our unsettled present, to which Kristeva’s humane reading of the suffering Russian author brings understanding and even solace.
Table of Content
Preface
Part I: The Flood of Language
1. The Condemned Man, the Sacred Malady, and the Sun
2. Dostoyevsky, “Author of My Life”
3. In the Steps of the Liberated Convict
4. Beyond Neurosis
5. The God-Man, the Man-God
6. The Purloined Letter
7. Everything Is Permitted
Part II: A Carnivalesque Theologian
8. The Russian Virus
9. Christocentrism
10. The Pleasures of Evil and Misfortune
11. The National Christ
12. Catholicism, Atheism, Nihilism
13. The Nihilist Seeking God
14. Laughter, Spokesperson for the Obscene
15. “The Novel Is a Poem”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.”Armine Kotin Mortimer is professor emerita of French literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the translator of Julia Kristeva’s novel The Enchanted Clock (Columbia, 2018) and the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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