George Pattison’s Conversations with Dostoevsky presents “an interpretation of Dostoevsky’s Christian view of life” (v), and could only have been written by someone who has studied and reflected upon Fedor Dostoevskii for many years. The first two thirds comprise a “novel”: seven conversations between the narrator and Dostoevskii himself, transpiring between November 2018 and April 2019. Pattison’s narrator claims he has not really written a novel (191), but that is what I’ll call it. The latter third of the book presents an excellent contextual commentary on the issues discussed in the “novel.”
J. M. Coetzee and Leonid Tsypkin have depicted Dostoevskii as a literary character in his own time and place; Pattison’s novel, set in contemporary academe, narrated by a middle-aged Glasgow professor asking “the eternal questions,” evokes David Lodge at his best. Pattison insists “that these conversations are about Dostoevsky and not the narrator” (v). Nevertheless, the narrator emerges as an interesting character in his own right, subtly transformed by his encounters. Pattison observes that his narrator lacks a “coherent world view,” is blind to “the good things that are there in his life” and “needs a better moral and spiritual framework” (v); Dostoevskii helps him find one. In his first encounter, he asks whether “the words [Dostoevsky] gave to Sonia, to Zosima, to Alyosha [were] true” (5). By January, he’s wondering, “Did I want to find Christ?” (111). By April, he’s attending his local church, feeling “a bit more tuned in to what was going on” (192). By the end, he’s grateful to Dostoevskii, and wonders, “Maybe I’m starting to get it” (184).
But Pattison’s intention is to illuminate Dostoevskii, and he gives the reader a wholistic sense of the Russian novelist’s “higher realism” (170). Dostoevskii was “free to make things up” yet strove to “remain faithful to reality” (83). For all his social criticism, he remained attentive to reality’s spiritual dimension: “the world is flooded with light once we have eyes to see” (181). Pattison portrays Dostoevskii’s faults but, more memorably, his inspiring vision of the ideal Christian life. For Dostoevskii, the call to sainthood was real: in their humility and capacity to remember, saints mediate God’s love. They willingly acknowledge that they are guilty (not simply responsible) “for all.” Dostoevskii distinguishes neurotic, self-centered guilt from the salutary guilt of inter-creatural solidarity: “To acknowledge one’s guilt is to allow others into your world … to see [them] with the eyes of love” (33). Saints reflect the kenotic Christ and radiate “the joy [that is] the only real answer to all those interminable eternal questions” (181).
A few days after Christmas, the narrator asks Dostoevskii: “Do you see Him?” The silent moment that follows echoes Alyosha’s paradisal vision of Zosima (and Christ) in “Cana of Galilee”: “The light I’d once glimpsed deep in his eyes seemed suddenly to shine out with almost tangible brightness and his face became somehow radiant” (113). Dostoevskii claims “I may not tell you how it is here” (179), but nevertheless, he describes a heavenly feast in which “we are all here” and “our joy is no longer for ourselves only, it’s for the bridegroom” (178). His state is also purgatorial: “Even here, where I am now, we’re still in the process of shedding the last illusions of what you call egotism” (176). We see signs of his penitence: sorrowfully, Dostoevskii acknowledges the antisemitic guilt he bears, “in this case, ‘more than anyone’” (166). He admits that he could have done better with women—the characters he created, and his own flesh and blood companions: “If I’d really remembered what Anna Grigoryevna needed and deserved from me, then I’d never have gone to the roulette hall” (169). In a park, he is joined by Vladimir Solovʹev, and seems to grudgingly grant that his more ecumenically-minded friend was closer to the truth. Dostoevskii cannot comment on specific current events, but insists that “Russia should never use military power against fellow Slavs” (192). And he acknowledges his dialogical debt to other writers—to Charles Dickens, but above all to the Bible, and aphoristically affirms: “Only God creates out of nothing. The rest of us have to make do with what they receive” (49).
A brief review cannot do justice to the breadth and depth of Pattison’s book. His commentary integrates relevant scholarship in a superlative analysis of perennial topics: film versions of Dostoevskii’s works, suicide, the afterlife, lying, guilt, the Bible, Christ, Mary, women, theosis, kenosis, Judaism, nationalism, and his insistence upon “living life.” His hopeful vision remembers yet anticipates “”the twin possibilities of forgiveness and personal respect in even the most ruined lives” (286).
Pattison proffers no “final word,” but his readers will resonate with his narrator’s conclusion: “And yet … and yet … I hear the pawnbroker’s despairing monologue, I listen to Ivan’s howl of protest, I hear the story of Markel, and it’s almost as if Fyodor Mihailovich was sitting here now, as heart speaks to heart, person to person. Whether or not God exists, that too is a miracle” (193). He echoes Cardinal Newman’s motto—cor ad cor loquitur—and honors the penultimate “and yet” that marks any reading of Dostoevskii. As the “novel’s” Dostoevskii rightly insists, “It’s up to the reader to do with it what you will” (107). This brilliantly hybrid book will help any reader to more deeply understand Dostoevskii’s work—and then “do with it what they will.”
