Becoming Dostoevsky (how Rowan Williams opens up Bakhtin)

Abstract With the end of Communism in Russia, non‐materialist contexts were enthusiastically restored to Mikhail Bakhtin's globally famous ideas of carnival, dialogism, and polyphony. This essay surveys Rowan Williams's 2008 study Dostoevsky: Language, Faith + Fiction as a major contribution to this effort, concentrating on those general philosophical principles that Williams and Bakhtin share: the Trinitarian nature of interpersonal relation, our need for affirmation from the outside, the inexhaustible potential of the Word, the relevance of the Orthodox icon to Christian charity, the seriousness of the demonic and yet the negotiability of the tragic. Williams is not without his criticism of Bakhtinian readings of Dostoevsky—especially any tolerance for that miserably failed Christ figure, Prince Myshkin. However, both Williams and Bakhtin prefer to integrate others’ views rather than to confront or exclude. Williams opens up Bakhtin (and Dostoevsky as well) in ways unavailable to Bakhtin from inside his own time and place.