Conversations with Dostoevsky

Reviews / Votes

George Pattison's multi-voiced scholarly fiction on Dostoevsky's Christian faith is an echo-chamber of genres: Dialogue of the Dead, Ivan Karamazov's hallucination, Kierkegaard's uplifting discourse, Soloviev's Three Conversations, and a defense of literary creativity as a patient and learned therapy for the soul. The result is a game-changer. Rise and walk, read and see. * Caryl Emerson, Princeton University * In this wonderfully searching and imaginative dialogue, George Pattison explores many of the hardest questions any of us can face--among them, about love, humility, truth, flourishing, and finding or sustaining meaning in our lives. At its heart is an intensely personal investigation of what it is to live a Christian life, which will fascinate and inspire readers, whatever their own religious commitments. * Simon May, King's College London * A completely original and deeply imaginative engagement with a novelist whose spiritual and intellectual legacy is perhaps more complex and disturbing than ever at this time of heightened conflict in Eastern Europe. George Pattison helps us read Dostoevsky with sympathy, but does not blunt the hard questions he puts to us--and that we have to put to him. * Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury * Pattison, drawing on a wealth of literature, gives us a Dostoevsky for the issues of our time and every time, and can be strongly recommended. * Rt Revd Lord Harries, Church Times * [A]n original, brilliant, confounding and honest-to-god novel. Pattison says that Conversations with Dostoevsky is not a novel; I would argue that, if he had written a novel before, he would call it one, because it is....I don't think any of us admirers could get closer to the heart of Dostoevsky's art and soul than Pattison's narrator does. * Robert Blaisdell, Russian Life * Pattison has given us an excellent book on the thought of one of the greatest novelists of all time. Dostoevsky will continue to fascinate not only older, well-read university professors (even if they are fictitious) but anyone who dares to pick him up and venture into the world of Dostoevsky. * Greg Peters, The Heythrop Journal *