Description
Book SynopsisJulia 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.
Trade ReviewPoetic, stunning, fascinating, and deeply insightful, Kristeva’s readings of Dostoyevsky are as much about us and our time as they are about him and his works. This book is a celebration of literature and language as an antidote to the extremes of nihilism and fundamentalism that still threaten us today. -- Kelly Oliver, philosopher, novelist, and professor emerita, Vanderbilt University
The full force of Julia Kristeva’s lifetime of (psycho)analyzing revolutionary writers and speaking beings come together in this masterful analysis of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s life and work. Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic novels, as Kristeva brilliantly shows, exemplify the human capacity for sublimation. Decades before Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and its primary processes, Dostoyevsky was very deliberately wielding the sting of the negative, turning demons into words, new meanings, and art. -- Noëlle McAfee, author of
Fear of Breakdown: Politics and PsychoanalysisTable of ContentsPreface
Part I: The Flood of Language1. 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 Theologian8. 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
