"Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language" by Julia Kristeva is a short but dense 65 pages book. The style is one that some scholars adore, and others hate: highly allusive, assuming great erudition on the side of the reader, unwilling to offer concessions to those who struggle to follow. The thematic structure of the book will likely please some readers while irritating others. What it does allow for is a broad sweep of works to be discussed. I don't think this book will appeal to many readers who aren't somewhat familiar with most of Dostoyevsky's work

I was drawn to this book after reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky
This is a short book, the material is highbrow and specialized, the writer a renown
Psychoanalyst.
I wanted to thank the publishers for a review copy.

In this dense and discursive exploration of Dostoevsky’s writing and what it has meant to her, Julia Kristeva went completely over my head. Although I found occasional moments of clarity much of the time I simply had no idea what she was trying to say. A flood of language indeed. I guess this is one for Kristeva admirers and those already familiar with her thought and philosophy, for she certainly doesn’t make any concessions for the uninitiated. Although I enjoyed the introduction from Rowan Williams (whose sentences at least made sense) this definitely wasn’t a book for me.

Why should we reread Dostoevsky? The question is posed at the end of the book. Rowan Williams in his introduction attempts to interpret Kristeva by saying, “so that we may learn what not many contemporaries can teach us, and what systematic secularism cannot teach us, as a culture, even as a species.” Kristeva herself praises Dostoevsky’s inventiveness, for inventing an original and inimitable form, what she says a “polyphonic” novel. The premise is interesting and Kristeva explains how Dostoevsky’s ideas find relevance in twentieth-century philosophers, spanning from Sartre’s existentialism to Freud’s psychoanalysis, in their infancies.

Kristeva’s analysis subtly explains how Dostoevsky’s ideas were ahead of his time. The nihilist war, when “everything is permitted” is ever-present in our modern life, in the era of post-truth. “No more pleasures but urgent messages on multiple apps, no more friends but ‘followers’ and ‘likes’, and when, unable to express yourself in the quasi-Proustian sentences of Dostoevsky’s possessed, you give yourself over to the addiction of clicks and selfies,” somehow this description of our modern life elevates Dostoevsky’s nihilist war to another level.

So why should we reread Dostoevsky? I guess Kristeva’s seminal essays on Dostoevsky are pretty self-explanatory on how his spectral images and ideas are ever-present in modern life. And probably, it could be said so as well to other classics. They form the basic and the central tenets of life. While Dostoevsky was the product of the eighteenth-century, he appeared during the era of transition to modern life, predicting what’s about to come through his characters. But I’ll have to warn that Kristeva’s words are quite cryptical and might not be easy to read, especially for readers who haven’t read much of Dostoevsky’s books.

Reviewed from a digital copy made available by the publisher through NetGalley.

“Dostoyevskian man is haunted by his living corpse.” - 26

I find this book difficult to rate, when I saw the cover I got excited and expected something like 400-500 pages of juicy analysis, it is Dosto after all, but really Kristeva’s analysis is about 65 pages long. This makes the book short enough to seem more accessible than it is.

Unsurprisingly, it will help with the reading of this book that you are somewhat familiar with Kristeva’s previous works and her style. I’ve read some at Uni, and I could follow along, so you don’t need to be an expert really, just passingly familiar or very open to learn.

To read this it will probably help most of all to have Dostoevsky’s works fresh on your mind.

The style is effervescent, it is like a dance that flits around the pages taking a step into one of Dostoevsky’s novels, flitting over to the next, and pirouetting around Kristeva’s psycho-analysis and linguistics.

The problem with this is that there is a distinct lack of cohesion and coherency until about page 33 ( about half way through) when it feels like an unstructured preamble ends and the real analysis takes shape with the chapters “The second sex outside of sex”, “Children, rapes, and sensual pleasure”, and “Everything is permitted”.
These chapters were excellent but far too short for my liking, it feels like you just scratch the surface of the analysis and then it is just over,

I for example was thrilled to see a discussion on “Krotkaya”, which Kristeva herself notes as “underrated”, yet her own analysis is barely a page. The theme carries on, as do all the themes through out, but the restlessness structure makes it somewhat unsatisfactory to read.

That said, the strongest sections of this little book to me are the discussions on the relationship between Myshkin-Rogozhin, Nastasya Filippovna, Grushenka, Stavrogin and his crimes (though that is fleshed out and strengthened by William’s foreword), and the discussion in father figures.

“Dostoyevsky is in the process of investing a polyphonic writing in which this <it> guesses itself. Henceforth nothing will stop the narrator in his accelerated quest for new cruelties.”

One thing I appreciated is the amount of space “Devils” gets, I find it an often underrated novel and it’s characters, like Stavrogin, deeply fascinating.

“Proud, suffering, dominating, murdered, Dostoevsky’s women are not only ‘commensurate with man’ has writes Nikolai Berdyaev, well-informed observer). They reveal to men their own unrecognized and repressed depths. They also inspire their irreconcilable eroticism, their feminine solitude: to be shared later or never. Battered by the vortex of ‘ils’, women are ‘îles’.”

This quote, beyond revealing to me that I hope to one day be referred to as a “well-informed observer”, is a sample of Kristeva’s style, I don’t know if she “brings anything new” to the table of Dostoevsky scholarship really, but what she brings is lively and evocative. I only wish for more structure, because when she really gets into it is vey interesting and really good, but there is just not enough space for anything really interesting to get through. I imagine this was a lot of fun for Kristeva though, the text certainly reads like she had a good time and had carried a lot of these thoughts for some time. But I wish the text had gotten to sit with them more.

This was probably about 3,5 stars for me, because I can’t get over the feeling that something is lacking, even if I had a good time reading this and thought that a lot of her thoughts, at least for me, brought new depths to Dosto.

One pet peeve though, both Kristeva and Williams mention Vladimir Solovyov, and while it is true that like with most Russian authors, his name occurs in a number of variant spellings, it annoyed me that Williams writes “Soloviev” (p. xxv) and Kristeva ”Solovyov” (p.21). Feels like at least within the pages of a small book like this one spelling could’ve been settled on.

Big thank you to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book to read!

Well researched, while many of the references went over my head because I have not read much Dostoyevsky I can tell that the author makes good points. Interesting read. The formatting was unreadable on kindle due to the copyright warnings and other characters on the page. Interested in a final version after I have read some more Dostoyevsky and for better formatting.

Kristeva writes in an eloquent manner about Dostoyevsky's work, arguing some interesting points concerning major thematic schemas and the contemporary reach of the author's polyphonies.

I suspect that this book is particularly enjoyable for those who already are familiar with Julia Kristeva's oeuvre. Because the thinking of the French linguist-psychoanalyst is a world apart, not always accessible to everyone. I read almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's work a long time ago, so I thought this little book would bring me closer to both the eminent Russian writer and Kristeva herself. Unfortunately, that turned out differently. I have no doubts about Kristeva's expertise: she has clearly read Dostoevsky thoroughly and in this book she goes into almost all of his books. So that requires that you are also familiar with that. But Kristeva's analysis of the Dostoevsky Empire is so tied to her own oeuvre that she tends to jump from one book to the next, piecemeal, making the reading very heavy. What I am left with is that Dostoevsky's work is so rich and prophetic that it belongs to the absolute pinnacle of existential literature. And I didn't need Kristeva to acknowledge that.
(Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!)

Ah, Julia Kristeva. A number of years ago, working on my BA dissertation concerning intertextuality, I came across some of her writings (she is, after all, the one who coined the term) - the idea that all texts are created from other texts appealed to me, and fit my studies at the time. I never got around to reading more of her work, somehow, but I did notice when she was accused of being a communist collaborator a few years back, although it seemed to be empty smoke.

Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, I've known for (slightly) longer. After high school years of endless, empty praise for purple prose classics, I picked up "Crime and Punishment" on a whim and was shocked to discover he was readable and exciting. It was the first time I got an inkling that great books could truly be great.

Naturally, Kristeva writing about Dostoyevsky appealed to me.

„Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language” is short - the book is barely over 100 pages, of which Kristeva's work take up 65. It is, however, dense.

Kristeva goes through Dostoyevsky's works on theme by theme, rather than book by book, discussing Christic themes, female characters, sensuality, patricide with a love for the source text and a seemingly endless string of short quotations at hand.

Her writing style is one that some scholars I know adore, and others hate: highly allusive, assuming great erudition on the side of the reader, unwilling to offer concessions to those who struggle to follow. You either know what she's talking about and enjoy the references and ironic twists of phrase, or you don't.

At rare moments, she's unusually personal, not only in the introduction when she references her first encounters with the author even while her father attempted to persuade her she would not "like" him (it seems we both vividly remember encountering Dostoyevsky for the first time), but also later on, such as when she refers to Dostoyevsky as "Saint Dosto".

Her psychoanalytical approach is also visible throughout, standing out in the way she discusses patricide, sex, death, and more. How much one is willing to agree with her depends, I suppose, on how much one agrees with psychoanalysis in general, but it's still interesting to see Dostoyevsky's work from that perspective.

One problem I've found with her approach, however, is that it's sometimes hard to tell what Dostoyevsky's approach and what's Kristeva's interpretation of Dostoyevsky (especially if, like me, you haven't (re)read some of his books recently). For example, has Raskolnikov committed matricide in "Crime and Punishment", even in a figurative sense? I don't recall him having a filial connection to his victim, even on an emotional level, but right now I doubt myself. Or is it simply Kristeva's psychoanalytical interpretation that any woman old enough to be one's mother symbolically takes the place of the mother?

Her explanation of wordplay in the original Russian, however, I believe has a firmer footing, as she discusses authorial choices such as the naming of Raskolnikov.

What I entirely disagreed with, however, was Kristeva's determination to bring Dostoyevsky into contemporaneity, referencing Facebook and digital communication as a parallel to the author's polyphonies, or saying one of his characters had a "me too" moment. While I firmly believe that there can be parallels between old works and modern times, I believe they're parallels: they may look similar, but they have no meeting point. We can draw similarities, and we can ponder on our lives while inspired by a book written long ago, but the book itself is not a quasi-prophecy simply because we find it relevant - yet Kristeva's comments often strike me as trying too hard to bring a contemporary relevance to them by making them into just such quasi-prophecies.

But do books need to be contemporary in some sense to appeal to us and remain relevant? My answer to that would be no. It's up to each generation to see how it wishes to look at a story; and the story will, thus, always be new in some way, without being tied to that particular interpretation.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for offering a free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.