John Givens's subject is “the anxiety over the meaning and significance of Jesus Christ” in Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Writers who wanted to make Christ central to their fiction faced substantial obstacles both in the literary environments in which they wrote and in the fictional modes which were available to them. Realism in literary method, materialism in philosophy, and higher criticism in theology—which divested Christ of his divinity—created a less than conducive environment for the “imaging” of Christ. The prescriptive materialism and official anti-religious policies of the Soviets in the twentieth century made the presentation of Christ and Christian ideals an even more precarious endeavor. Givens attempts to determine to what extent the novels of Fedor Dostoevskii (The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov), Lev Tolstoi (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection), Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita), and Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago) were successful in overcoming the literary, cultural, and theological obstacles to writing effectively about Christ. And if these novelists were indeed successful in overcoming these obstacles—or at least partially successful—what were the literary strategies they employed to do so?

Givens's answer is that all four novelists exploited the devices and stratagems of apophatic or negative theology, employing a via negativa: that is, defining Christ not by what he is (kataphatic theology) but by what he is not. Russian writers presumably had easier access to the via negativa because apophatic theology played a much greater role in Orthodoxy than in the Christian theology of the west. The idea underlying apophatic theology that Givens employs is that God cannot be adequately described (or presented) using the positive concepts by which we traditionally define him, for God is, in his essence, beyond definition, beyond any type of rational understanding or conceptual framework: St. Anselm's “God is greater than anything that we can conceive.”

The employment of apophatic theology to literary texts of varying styles and complexity is not without its own problems since what is supposed to exist (Christ) must be deduced from what is not. In theology this is less of a problem, since the assumption is that God exists and that God is greater than anything that can be thought. In the literary texts that Givens examines, it is not always assumed that God even exists, not to speak that he is greater than anything that we can conceive. In fact, the idea of God's existence is directly challenged in almost all of these works. Furthermore, as Givens emphasizes, Tolstoi explicitly denies Jesus's divinity (that he is God) and dismisses Jesus as a historical personage. Only Jesus's teachings are important to him. Tolstoi's Jesus, then, is clearly not the Jesus of conventional apophatic theology. Givens exploits the via negativa of apophatic theology as a device for literary analysis, whereby the presence of something is affirmed as a result of its either being denied or shown to be absent. Absence here implies that something, in fact, exists, points to it, as it were, as an index of its existence. But how far can absence or denial be pushed to indicate presence? Are all instances in a novel in which darkness is invoked indices of an absent Christ? Are all refutations of Christ really affirmations of Christ? Does Dostoevskii “seek affirmation in seeming refutation” (41)?

Sometimes Givens uses negative theology as a magic wand to affirm the existence of the divine: the greater the apparent absence of the divine, the greater the possibility of its actual presence. This strategy works best in Dostoevskii, where many of his characters are preoccupied with the existence of God and the significance of both his presence and absence. But even in Dostoevskii the via negative produces varied results, working less well in The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov than in The Idiot. Givens characterizes the “The Grand Inquisitor” section of The Brothers Karamazov as “an apophatic text par excellence” (50) since it constitutes “a negative affirmation of God” (52). One of the problems is that many, including Berdiaev and Alyosha Karamazov, have seen it otherwise: as a kataphatic, not an apophatic text, praising God, not reviling him. To Givens's credit, he almost never glosses over the problems and limitations of his method when they arise. He also concedes that Tolstoi's religious thought, grounded as it is in reason and not negative theology, is not that different in the end from the socialist ideas of some of his contemporaries, including the more self-sacrificing and ascetic members of the revolutionary intelligentsia. Tolstoi's religious thought in Resurrection is more aligned, Givens implies, with insurrection than resurrection, more with Marx than with Jesus. Givens acknowledges the contradictions, aporias, disjunctiveness, and incompleteness of The Master and Margarita but argues that they add to the atmosphere of mystery and mystification that keeps the idea of Christ in play, although not to any certainty about Christ's existence or relevance.

Despite the reservations that one might have about Givens's employment of apophatic theology in examining the image of Christ in Russian literature, his analysis of these classic novels is invariably intelligent, well-researched, and provocative. All those who are interested in the literary representation of Christ will read with interest and reward Givens's insightful analyses of these major writers and texts.