Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language
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 master: 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.
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The Origins of Ukrainian Gothic: History, Cultural Hauntings, and Political Imagination
Ukrainian dark prose that draws on the conventions of the British and western European Gothic novel emerged in the nineteenth century and continued uninterrupted until the early twentieth century. Writers like Orest Somov and Mykola Hohol‘ engaged the cultural capital of the Gothic literary tradition, adjusting it to their local contexts. However, as this study shows, Gothic conventions slowly became a platform to introduce politically dissenting views.
Ukrainian Romantics who used horror as a distancing technique began to pursue the Ukrainian national idea, first covertly and later more openly. This was followed by an aesthetic shift in post-Romantic authors such as Marko Vovchok and Liudmyla Staryts’ka-Cherniakhivs’ka, who began to employ the horrific purposefully to condemn the colonial, imperialistic politics of the Russian Empire and its successor the Soviet Union toward Ukraine. This thematic direction shaped the character of the Ukrainian Gothic over the first century of its incipience, from the 1820s until the late 1920s, just before the Stalinist purges. Through a comparative study of the horror works of selected authors vis-à-vis major developments in the Gothic genre and the application of postcolonial theory, this monograph capitalizes on the subversive tendencies of the Ukrainian Gothic.
Drawing novel theoretical conclusions about the development of the genre in its adopted Ukrainian context, this book depicts how the Gothic became a powerful tool of resistance and decolonization.
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