Russia’s Gospel Writer
Dostoevsky & the Affirmation of Life by Predrag Cicovacki
Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction by Rowan Williams
reviewed by Ralph C. Wood
The literary critic Harold Bloom once defined a classic as a book that requires us permanently to rearrange the furniture of our lives. He meant, I suspect, that such a text prevents us from viewing the world through conventional lenses; it requires us not only to see the world with cleansed vision but also to reorder our lives accordingly. T. S. Eliot defined literary greatness in similar terms. “The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s [Divine Comedy] is one of those [books] which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.”
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is another. I suspect that it has caused more readers of various types and commitments to redefine themselves both morally and spiritually than has any other non-biblical text, excepting only Dante’s.
Neither of the two books I will consider here—Predrag Cicovacki’s Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life and Rowan Williams’s Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction—is devoted entirely to an explication of The Brothers Karamazov; on the contrary, they both attend to the whole of Dostoevsky’s fiction. Yet this greatest of Dostoevsky’s novels becomes the center of their focus; for it is there, more than in any other place, that Dostoevsky most convincingly confronts the peril and promise of late-Enlightenment modernity.
Fantastic Reality
In Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life (St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), Predrag Cicovacki, a professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, focuses on a single injunction that the novice monk Alyosha Karamazov gives to his brother Dmitri near the end of the novel. “Love life,” Alyosha enjoins his troubled sibling, “more than its meaning.”
Like many other readers of Dostoevsky, Professor Cicovacki regards Alyosha as a reliable spokesman for Dostoevsky himself. It is certainly true that Alyosha is warning Dmitri against the mistake made by their skeptical other brother Ivan.
Ivan is the Dostoevskian character who most fully embodies the soul-rending doubts that have become endemic to modern life. Citing the work of Isaiah Berlin, Cicovacki shows that Ivan is wracked by the three most devastating Enlightenment “humiliations” of Christian tradition: (1) the denial that man is the purpose and center of creation; (2) the insistence that man is but a creature of nature like all other animals; and (3) the discovery that reason is not autonomous and objective but subject to overt passions and covert illusions that radically distort its judgments.
Overly simply stated, Cicovacki’s argument is that Dostoevsky does not give typically Western answers to these questions. On the contrary, Dostoevsky is an anti-rationalist who insists, with Alyosha, that it is not only unnecessary but actually impossible to know the meaning of life as a condition for affirming it. In this rather existentialist reading of Dostoevsky, the great Russian is seen as providing a helpfully Eastern vision of life over against a more Western outlook.
Ralph C. Wood was, until his retirement, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His books include The Comedy of Redemption (University of Notre Dame Press), Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans), and Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (Baylor University Press).
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