Customer Reviews

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Making of the Christian Imagination)

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This book is clear, intelligent and quite serious. The author writes more like a philosopher than a literary critic, appropriate for Dostoevsky's highly charged, philosophically oriented themes.
Along the way Williams present a profound account of the reality of spiritual life. While he and Dostoyevsky are tied into Christianity, a person with any kind of spiritual concern could learn a great deal from this.
(My own background in these matters includes several books and articles on contemporary religious life and spirituality.)

This is an excellent read. It is my second copy to purchase ... for others to read. Rowan Williams excells in providing a wonderful window on Dostoevsky's reasons for writing. The dialogical engagement between characters and reader is intentional and demanding. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a must read for those who wish to engage with Dostoevsky, for those who wish, who need, to be confronted by life and faith.
Thank you Archbishop Rowan Williams and Dostoevsky

I wanted to like this book, but I did not. I have read virtually all of Dostoevsky and a good deal of secondary literature. To follow this book, you have to not only have read the 4 big novels (BK, C&P, Demons & Idiot), but also remember them well enough to recall scenes on demand. I found the book too dense and diffuse to appreciate. Reading this book feels like swimming underwater. You have little sense of overview or where you are, and the thoughts keep coming with no let-up or chance to take a breath. The chapters felt more like separate papers, not like a developing process. There is a conclusion-chapter, which helped a bit. But it felt more to me like a post hoc and ad hoc attempt to tie things together. At the end, all I can really say about the content is that D. sees the construction of a novel as somewhat analogous to God's creation of the world, with similar issues of freedom within constraint. I would recommend this only to professional scholars of D. Not for enthusiastic amateurs.

Dostoevsky teaches psycology better than any. This new book studies motives of child abuse, unmotivated violence,culture clash,national identity, still modern problems. R. Williams able to show that "belief and unbelief are alike rather than 'either' to conclude an argument or to take refuge in the unfathomable of subjectivity." Challenges are truth, freedom (possibility of choice) and responsibility of others.