Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language

by Julia Kristeva, Rowan Williams (Foreword), Jody Gladding (Translator)

Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. “Of course, and as usual,” she recalls, “I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed.” Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life―and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted and enraptured by the force of his writing.

In this book, Kristeva embarks on a wide-ranging and stimulating inquiry into Dostoyevsky’s work and the profound ways it has influenced her own thinking. Reading across his major novels and shorter works, Kristeva offers incandescent insights into the potent themes that draw her back to the Russian God, otherness, violence, eroticism, the mother, the father, language itself. Both personal and erudite, the book intermingles Kristeva’s analysis with her recollections of Dostoyevsky’s significance in different intellectual moments―the rediscovery of Bakhtin in the Thaw-era Eastern Bloc, the debates over poststructuralism in 1960s France, and today’s arguments about whether it can be said that “everything is permitted.” Brilliant and vivid, this is an essential book for admirers of both Kristeva and Dostoyevsky. It also features an illuminating foreword by Rowan Williams that reflects on the significance of Kristeva’s reading of Dostoyevsky for his own understanding of religious writing.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works. Her Columbia University Press books include Hatred and Forgiveness (2012); The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014); and, with Philippe Sollers, Marriage as a Fine Art (2016).

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suspect that this book is particularly enjoyable for those who are already familiar with Julia Kristeva's oeuvre. Because the thinking of this French linguist-psychoanalyst is a world apart, and 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 doubt about Kristeva's expertise: she has clearly read Dostoevsky thoroughly and in this book she goes into almost all of his books. But Kristeva's analysis of the Dostoevsky Empire is so tied to her own oeuvre that she tends to jump from one book and protagonist to the next, piecemeal, making the reading rather 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 to be honest, I didn't need Kristeva to acknowledge that.
(Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!)

[Roxana Chirilă · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 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.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yesterday my friend Joe asked me why I was such a romantic and so fond of imagining a life spent with people I’ve barely spoken to. I’d just read the preface of this and was able to reasonably think “maybe it’s Dostoevsky’s fault?” Parts of this book provide the beginnings (beginnings only because I didn’t read carefully tbh) of a nice lens for him: мысль действительная, ~”real thoughts”, which I guess really is the issue at hand for me, and maybe why I’m predisposed to like (if not am conditioned by) Dosto.

I’ve always read White Nights as a really happy story, for example. It doesn’t work out for the narrator in the end, but he decides to believe in his thoughts of what could have been, and derives happiness from his belief that he lives in a world where they were, in fact, possible. Maybe I’m similar? Maybe in some realms of life, you can value thoughts more than facts?

Currently don’t have the capacity to connect this idea to Dosto’s empathy/humanism, but I think there is a path between them somewhere.


That being said, don’t think literary theory is for me. The first sentence of this book (albeit preface) has a French word in it and in the third sentence is the phrase “it is a seductive error to think of telling or representation as a kind of secondary refinement to some basic and unproblematic registering of stimuli.” Even though it resonates I guess, not super fun to read.

(Thanks Victor for the bday present! +1 star bc I like you)

[Terese · Rating 3 out of 5]

“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 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!

[Mandy · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

First read this last summer which sent me deep into a rabbit warren of rereading Dostoyevsky and Kristeva. Finished a 3rd reading now and it still seems locked in its private Kristevan language, which is fine, just don't come to this book expecting a clear explication of Dostoyevsky. The more you know Dostoyevsky and understand Kristeva's work, the more illuminating this book becomes. The writing is exciting, however, and she maps her intellectual path, which is also fascinating.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Proust's novels are a mentorship in the signs that call us to think, then Dostoyevsky's books are what happens when these signs begin to collapse in on themselves under the rush of the "flood of language". none of this feels rushed but I wish Kristeva wrote something longer than 65 pages this time

[Ilan A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don’t have much footing in Freud/psychoanalysis and the novel so frankly this was a tough hang. I liked when she called social media the collective polyphonic novel👬🌎👬Food for thought🤔. I thought the introduction was great

[Juli Rahel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dostoyevsky is one of the giants of world literature and I began my own exploration of his writing two years ago. I sunk into The Brothers Karamazov and then battled my way through Crime & Punishment, fascinated by the man's mind. So naturally, The Flood of Language, coming from Julia Kristeva, would intrigue me. It is a very dense reading experience, however, and I'm not quite sure what I have gotten out of it. Thanks to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the delay in reviewing!

I first encountered Julia Kristeva's work when I was writing my MA thesis on psychoanalytic archetypes in film adaptions of medieval work. I had sunk so far into Freud and Jung that I was losing some perspective. While their work is fascinating, much of it is also very dated, especially when we consider how much our understanding of gender and sex has developed. With Kristeva, however, I found a useful concept, namely the 'abject'. The abject is how we respond to things that threaten how we understand the world around us, the things that do not respect boundaries or easy categorisation. This applies, for example, to a dead body, which at once seems human and yet so clearly isn't a person anymore. Another example is the skin that forms on warm milk, which makes many, myself included, feel incredibly icky. The abject also applies, in some ways, to responses to the female body, especially the maternal body, and everything that emerges from it. For more on the abject, see Kristeva's Powers of Horror! I have very much enjoyed working with this concept because it feels applicable and recognisable. There is a lot about psychoanalysis, however, that I can do nothing with. It threatens to become very abstract and to rely largely on impressions, the connecting of various things without, in my opinion, tangible links. I am not helped by my own academic background here, as I am expected to use a lot of nuance and clarification, evidence, etc., even while working in the humanities. The looseness of some of what I read in The Flood of Language therefore was not something I could connect with.

Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language is an investigation of Dostoyevsky's work, articulated through Kristeva's own experiences reading him. The book therefore is partly a personal, almost ethnographic, approach to the literature, and yet also a deep dive into the literature itself. A big emphasis is the notion of language, especially as Dostoyevsky's writing has been noted for its multiplicity of voices. I believe that Kristeva explores the ways in which characters articulate themselves, try to make themselves understood, and usually fail to do so. Another big theme is religion, as Dostoyevsky was deeply Orthodox. There is a darkness to a lot of his writing, to the battles raging inside his characters, which can, I think, be difficult for many readers to approach. (Warning: the book does therefore deal with difficult topics such as abuse and rape.) Appreciating the role of religion can, perhaps, help in this. Kristeva also dedicates some chapters to the female characters in Dostoyevsky's novels, how they are seemingly not granted the same 'opportunity to construct themselves' outside of being the men's Other. I found these chapters very intriguing, but they were also full of psychoanalytical arguments I am not a fan of. Overall, The Flood of Language is an interesting insight into how Kristeva approaches and understands Dostoyevsky. Approaching it from that angle, it was a very interesting read. If I had approached it as something which was meant to aid my own understanding of Dostoyevsky, I probably would have merely gotten more questions than answers.

Kristeva is a semiotician and a psychoanalyst and a lot of her writing reflects those fields. She plays with language, with symbolism, with deeper meanings, and relies deeply on ideas of the pre-Oedipal and other Freudian conceptions. I have already noted some of my skepticisms regarding him and the field of psychoanalysis above and they do also affect my reading experience of Kristeva's writing. It is not that I think psychoanalysis, or psychoanalytic readings of literature, are not useful. They absolutely have their place within our understanding of culture and literature. I am a little tired, however, of everything being phallic, or a threat to the ego, etc. On top of that, the fields of psychoanalysis and cultural studies also enjoy using a lot of complex words. For example, 'disobjectalize' is a word I do not understand, which Kristeva uses. Not knowing the language she uses makes it very difficult to understand what kind of argument she is building up to. If I experience this, working in academia, I doubt the book is very accessible to other audiences. A book does not need to cater to all audiences, of course, and for those intrigued by theme and topic, The Flood of Language will have a lot to offer. But take your time with it. I would also like to note that Jody Gladding does an excellent job translating the book from the French!

Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language was a very interesting read, even if at times baffling or complicated. Kristeva writes intriguingly, and the novel is a lovely depiction of her personal experiences with Dostoyevsky.

URL: https://universeinwords.blogspot.com/...

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language by Julia Kristeva is a sweeping and engaging look into the literature of Dostoyevsky, how it has spoken to Kristeva at times through the years, and how one can read literature with an eye toward how it relates to the present rather than in a vacuum of privilege like some might prefer.

I did go back and reread some of his works, mostly some shorter pieces plus Karamazov, after my first pass through this book. As is usually the case with Kristeva, I was surprised at just how much her ideas added to my reading. Also no surprise is my not always seeing everything the same way. Which is a wonderful thing since it makes me think specifically about where I agree, where I don't, and where I might agree but still prefer a different approach.

She is not at all acting like these works were prophetic, she reads and where something in a novel or story sparks a comparison in her mind to something contemporary she mentions it. Why does one read if not to engage with the work as both a story taking place then and a story being read now? Perhaps simple minds prefer to read in a privileged vacuum where they don't learn anything from the text or gain more insight, but active reading almost demands that you make connections. Those connections may not all be positive but if a reader doesn't make connections either the work or the reader is vacuous.

The thematic structure of the book will likely please some readers while irritate others. What it does allow for is a broad sweep of works to be discussed. If every work she cites were to have its own chapter and still touch on all of the themes, the book would become large and unruly with the connections between the works harder to understand. That said, it does sometimes make for slower reading since the reader (at least this reader) has to sometimes stop and make sure they know what work of Dostoyevsky is now being cited. But that effort is definitely rewarded.

I don't think this book will appeal to many readers who aren't somewhat familiar with most of Dostoyevsky's work. However, if you have followed Kristeva's thinking over the years I think you will enjoy seeing her mind in action when focused on one writer. I also think this offers some insight into how we might read and reread various writers we find important in our lives.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Bagus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why should we reread Fyodor 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 Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism to Sigmund 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 basis and the central tenets of life. While Dostoevsky was the product of the nineteenth 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 you 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.

[Ahmadreza Mousavi · Rating 2 out of 5]

به تازگی چاپِ اول این کتاب توسط نشر شوند منتشر شده است. کریستوا با رویکرد پساساختارگرایِ خود، سعی می‌کند داستایفسکی را از خلال از خاطراتش بسازد. اما، متاسفانه نتوانستم با زبانِ نویسنده ارتباط خاصی برقرار کنم. زبانِ کتاب برای‌ام مقداری ثقیل بود، حال در جریان نیستم که این به زبانِ خودِ نویسنده بازمی‌گردد یا ترجمهٔ کتاب، و در این مورد باید اهل فن نظر دهند.

داستایفسکی یا سیل زبان، ژولیا کریستوا، ترجمهٔ سهیل سُمی، نشر شوند، چاپ اول ۱۴۰۲

[Farida Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rushed reading binged on a few long train rides. Would’ve been better had she taken the time to expand her points fully, some unfinished ideas I’d love to hear more about. Loved all the notes from the underground reference, respectable proportions of biography, analysis, and societal implication.

[Walter Lazzarin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Libro che ha senso affrontare solo dopo avere letto altri libri su Dostoevskij. Molto parziale, per certi versi accademico, di certo perdibile.

[fletcher]

sometimes you read a book so you can reread it later, after reading other books.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit over my understanding, but well written & what I did understand was enlightening.

[Timothy Hoiland · Rating 3 out of 5]

“. . . the writer’s Christianity was not simply an idea or a moral and political engagement to reassure ‘the child of disbelief and doubt’ and the young rebel tormented by the scaffold, nihilism, and exile consubstantial with the human condition. His optimism and his glorification of thinking energy (so admired by André Gide) are incomprehensible without his Christian faith (vera in Russian) in the Word incarnate. His novels are Christian; his Christianity is novelistic.”

[Zozio]

Je retiens que Sophie Kovalevskaïa qui call out Dostoievski, diva totale