Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, by Rowan Williams
While the Anglican communion has been disintegrating, its symbolical head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has been writing an analysis of Dostoevsky’s novels. This in itself presents a need for explanation: Dostoevsky has generally been assessed as an habitué of the territory between agnosticism and atheism, but Rowan Williams sees him as the author of ‘a Christocentric apologetic’. Yet the characters in Dostoevsky are miserable and dysfunctional obsessives in the main; neurotic and repulsive creations of a mind that many have judged intellectually and morally opaque. In the 19th century and throughout the Soviet era Dostoevsky’s critics considered his books unhealthy. This does not seem to worry the Archbishop, who confesses, indeed, to having found the writing of his account ‘a delight’.
He is scrupulous in avoiding censorious language in explaining the ghastly conduct and opinions of Dostoevsky’s fictional creations, and it is usually only in accounts of child-abuse that he refers to ‘contemptible behaviour’.
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