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You can accuse the Archbishop of Canterbury of many things but at least he has impeccable taste in literature.
Rowan Williams has found time in his busy schedule to publish a book on the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Only last week he was saying Karl Marx was partly right about capitalism and that the financial markets need fresh regulation.
In his new book he argues that Marx's fellow beardie Dostoevsky was pretty much right about everything. For as Camus remarked more than half a century ago, “everybody knows that Dostoevsky and not Karl Marx is the true prophet of the 20th century”.
What we think of as quintessentially modern preoccupations are omnipresent in his work: terrorism, child abuse, the fragmentation of family, the secularisation and sexualisation of culture, the future of liberal democracy, the clash of cultures and the nature of national identity.
He had a deeply realist view of the world and a fearless willingness to represent man in his true colours as depraved and debased.
If you want proof of Dostoevsky's universal appeal just take a look at his modern disciples. They range from Gabriel García Márquez, who cited him along with Sophocles as his greatest mentor, to Peter Doherty, who chose Crime and Punishment as his favourite book, to Laura Bush, the American First Lady, who prefers the Brothers Karamazov (or so we're told). On second thoughts, don't look at them — just read his books.
His influence goes beyond an affinity with his subject matter. When she was young and wayward, actress Harriet Walter even claimed Crime and Punishment persuaded her to shoplift.
Dostoevksy asked all the important philosophical questions: how can man believe in a God with so much suffering (one of the Karamazov brothers says he wants to hand his entry ticket back to God because of the suffering of children); how can man cope with so much freedom (“If there is no God, everything is permitted”) and how can man not give in to corruption (“Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of needs, men distort their own nature”)? The author was a merciless critic of the West as he was of Russia. “I very much dislike the countenance of this world,” he said. There is no doubt he would say the same today.
But he is not all doom and gloom. There is nowhere else for his self-abased heroes to turn to in the end but God. He believed we must drive out the Gadarene swine so that a wonderful future can be born. Are you listening, Lehman Brothers? Dostoevsky knew more than anyone about the tumultuous consequences of being human. As, I suspect, does the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Reader views (1)
The Archbishop of Canterbury is reaching out in this book to the atheist brigade, the intellectual elite who should know better but who think the belief in God is dispensible childish superstition and who are deaf to the unparalleled depths of self-interrogaton contained in the canonical sacred texts and echoed in all great works of art, music and literature. Perhaps they will meet him half-way in a study of Dostoevsky. Or perhaps they will die in ignorance. Pity.
- Juan Zero, London, 30/09/2008 13:04
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