Dostoyevski, or the Flood of Language by Julia Kristeva Foreword by Rowan Williams Translated by Jody Gladding

Dostoyevski,

or the Flood of Language by Julia Kristeva Foreword by Rowan Williams Translated by Jody Gladding published by Columbia University Press is an act of love, an homage to Dosto, an author immensely loved  by Julia since her teenage age. Her father asked her to stay distant to Dosto's books, but this imperative to her meant reading all his books, becoming addicted. Why this?

As remarks Williams at the end of his foreword: "We may learn what not many contemporaries can teach us, and what a systematic secularism cannot teach us - something about how desire becomes human,about how speech and storytelling work to humanize our desire, about our fears of murderous absorption and our own murderous resort to abjection in enacting our desire and our terror, about our need for a symbolique that makes space for the recognition of love."

Dosto suffered: realistically and to my point of view, his human sufferance is visible in his books: that's why what experienced in first person sometimes is largely projected in his books. He became epileptic because of a trauma and this illness would have been a shadow and a reflection of his entire production, of his entire being, influencing under many ways, his works.

Reading Dosto means a full immersion in a world populated by many diversified characters and there is a research of truth,of digging deep that it is sometimes shocking.  

His protagonists are not perfect people: yes, some are splendid and understanding, but there are also addicted (he was a gambler as well!), sick, traumatized, desperate, conflictuals, but, for sure, unforgettable, because each character gives his best for being anyway at the reader's eyes, human.

The book will span through topics pretty beloved by Fedor: familiar conflicts, sex, men and women, the role of the mother and the father, parricide, his vision of God: in general Dosto rejected the Catholic church. For many reasons he thought that the best understanding of the real christian spirit passed through the Ordotox Church.

Sex is a controvertial thematic in Dosto: in The Idiot, I hadn't never read it in this way, as Julia does, but simply like an act of great compassion and human touch under many ways, when Prince Myshkin discovers that Rogozhin had killed Filippovna will consolate a devastated Rogozhin. After all, they both loved her.

Kristeva reads the relationship between the two protagonists at the end of the book erotically, not under the lense of compassion. Let's anyway remember that in a part of the book Myshkin told to Rogozhin: My cross will be your cross: and the cross as we all know was Filippovna, a controvertial girl. 

Paedophile acts are permitted and if now the protagonist, Stravogin would be strongly banned, at that time, in the era of Fedor: "Everything was permitted" also abominiums against children: same is for Ivan Karamazov. These deviances were lived as madness, "transition to action or suicide" writes Julia. 

Dosto is an immersion in our subconscious: that's why he was so loved by Freud, because of his penetrating mind: he enters in certain spheres of our soul that remain untouched with other authors: this research is absolutely wanted by the same author for his personal necessities. Fedor simply opens brains figuratively :-) more than any other author permitting to people a full-immersion in central thematics of our existences.

Another book I really enjoyed reading written by Julia Kristeva and that I warmly suggest to all of you25.

Anna Maria Polidori