Dostoevsky - Language, Faith and Fiction

From sexy cult to  the ex- Archbishop of Canterbury's book on Dostoevsky is a big step, but Dostoevsky has had a huge impact on me and my reading from teenage years onwards. I'll probably start rereading Notes from Underground just to get all Dostoevskyied up.  And spelling that name - it's so easy if you break it down
Dos     (2 more syllables)
toev  ( a russian toe)
sky (as in reach for)
There are plenty of alternative spellings - Penguin go for "Dostoyevsky", but that adds an extra complexity, so I'm sticking with the simplest, and if it's good enough for the Archbishop of Canterbury than it's good enough for me. 

Being able to spell Dostoevsky is always impressive, should there be anyone to display this talent to. I speak as someone who once wrote a "beautifully suggested" essay on Dostoevsky, and existentialism, but misspelt Sartre as Satre all the way through (way back in the 1970s, Modern European Mind at Sussex University).

So Rowan Williams take is a specifically Christian one, natch, ( I don't think he's read or will read Pedro Juan Gutierrez) and is coming from a deep (as in knows a lot about) theological perspective, most of which is lost on me.  But his reading of Dostoevsky is still accessible and meaningful, as long as you take it slowly. I'm going to use the blog to try and keep track of what he is saying, in the hope of finding what? Enlightenment?  Probably not, just a clearer light shone of the complexities of Dostoevsky.

So lets have a sample of Rowan William's prose. This is genuinely the next sentence I read as I picked up where I had left off this morning.

"What we have here, in fact, is remarkably like a highly dramatized version of the Hegalian Unhappy Consciousness, with a few extra refinements: the self's ideal existence is unattainable, and what is actually experienced in self-awareness is failure and finitude  finitude itself as a form of humiliation"
p19
(my link added for the Hegalian Unhappy Consciousness, should you be unfamiliar...)

I'll come back later and add some more as there are other things to do - and this snippet is, in context (rather unfair just to lift it like this) insightful. I think. I do need to think, and the challenge of having to do that will keep me going.