Julia Kristeva often references Fyodor Dostoyevsky in her work. She read him while growing up in Bulgaria, and continued after her move to France. She recalls her initial reading was against her father’s directive. As well as Dostoyevsky’s famous novels, she was also struck by his A Writer’s Diary – actually a major collection of short fictional pieces and non-fiction originally published in a periodical. Her reading of Dostoyevsky was, like her wider work, multilingual – in Bulgarian originally, then in French and in Russian.
Kristeva’s earliest references to Dostoyevsky are mediated through Mikhail Bakhtin, and her work on Bakhtin was important in his early Western European reception. Bakhtin’s book on Dostoyevsky had been published in 1929, and appeared in an expanded edition in 1963. But although his study of François Rabelais had been submitted as a thesis in 1940, it was not published in Russian until 1965. By the late 1960s, Bakhtin was in poor health and largely unknown in the west. Kristeva reviewed Bakhtin’s books on Dostoyevsky and Rabelais for Critique in 1967, in their 1963 and 1965 Russian editions, before they had been translated into French. She contributed a preface to the translation of his La Poétique de Dostoïevski in 1970, and the French translation of the Rabelais book appeared the same year. The English Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics followed in 1973; Rabelais in his World had appeared a few years before. Kristeva’s colleague and fellow Bulgarian exile Tzvetan Todorov wrote the first major book on Bakhtin’s work in 1981. (I wrote briefly about Bakhtin in one of my earliest articles, on Henri Lefebvre’s book about Rabelais, “Through the Eyes of the Fantastic: Lefebvre, Rabelais and Intellectual History” [or here]. I haven’t yet seen the new MIT Press translation of Rabelais and his World which came out last year.)
Until recently, though, Kristeva’s most sustained reading of Dostoyevsky was a long chapter in Black Sun, entitled “Dostoyevsky, The Writing of Suffering, and Forgiveness”. He is only briefly discussed as part of her wider theorisation of the abject (Pouvoirs de l’horreur, pp. 25-27; Powers of Horror, pp. 18-20). Black Sun is a book about depression and melancholia, and psychoanalysis as a counter-depressant. It’s part of the development of her work toward psychoanalysis from earlier themes around language and literature, but the first chapter is on the speech of the depressed, and as well as Dostoyevsky she also discusses Gérard de Nerval and Marguerite Duras. The book shows her interest in art too, including a long discussion of Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. As she notes, that’s a painting mentioned in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. There is an account of Dostoyevsky’s visit to see the painting on the Kunstmuseum Basel website which, like Kristeva’s book, quotes from his wife’s memoirs. In the chapter, Kristeva discusses sorrow and melancholia in relation to epilepsy as key themes in Dostoyevsky’s work. Religious art also features in her later The Severed Head: Capital Visions.
In 2019 and 2021, two books by Kristeva on Dostoyevsky were published. One was in the “Authors of my Life” series, a long essay by Kristeva introducing an anthology of texts. The texts were a few letters and excerpts from his novels, translated by André Markowicz, Anne Coldefy-Faucard, Gustave Aucouturier and Boris de Schœzer. The excerpts were organised thematically – myths, dream, nation, idea, double, carnival, play, crime, punishment, time, epilepsy, children, jouissance. In French this book had the simple title Dostoïevski, and Kristeva’s own text was just over 70 pages. In English the text by Kristeva alone and not the excerpts appeared as Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language. This made for a very short text of just 68 pages, which was supplemented with a preface by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.
Much more substantial was a second book, Dostoïevski face à la mort, ou le Sexe hanté du langage, translated as Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex. The second French book appears to have been timed for the bicentenary of Dostoyevsky’s birth. The second part of its title is a phrase Kristeva takes from her Tel Quel colleague and husband Philippe Sollers. In Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language this phrase is translated as “sex haunted by language” (8/xxx). Given both translations are with the same press, albeit with different translators, it is surprising they didn’t coordinate this choice.
The books continue themes from her previous work. Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language is part autobiographical, recalling the early encounters with his work, and seeing him as a psychoanalyst before Freud. Chapter 3 returns to the reactions to Holbein’s Dead Christ (36-38/26-28). She also discusses Dostoyevsky’s role as a narrator of the human condition, the crimes committed in his novels, the portrayal and treatment of women. The references in this longer book to the COVID-19 pandemic as the context of its writing makes it seem that this period allowed her to return to themes in much more detail. There isn’t much in the shorter English book which isn’t treated more expansively in the longer book.Kristeva is explicit that her reading is indebted to Freud’s 1928 essay “Dostoyevsky and Parricide”. This where Freud describes The Brothers Karamazov as “the most magnificent novel ever written” [p. 441]. Sollers had written about that reading in 1978, reprinted as a chapter of his Théorie des exceptions. Another aspect of the books are her discussions of sexual crimes, and reports of a child rape which found its way into Dostoyevsky’s fiction. But Kristeva’s discussion is so convoluted that it took me a while, and some looking for other sources, to discover the event happened when Dostoyevsky was a child, and that he was apparently a close witness of the aftermath, rather than actively involved.
One reviewer, Samuel C. Still, criticised how “Kristeva’s anachronistic superimposition of Freudian psychosexual categories onto Dostoyevsky’s novels (1) serves to perpetuate this line of misinterpretation and (2) only undermines their ultimate character as religious texts, the hermeneutical key to which is the kenotic suffering of Christ understood through the lens of Dostoyevsky’s Orthodox Christian faith” (p. 91). Kristeva does however clearly foreground the importance of Holbein’s image of the dead Christ. Religious themes are crucial to her readings. Williams’s preface is also explicitly about the religious aspects of Dostoyevsky’s work, and how he sees Kristeva’s work as complementary. There is a lot more, especially Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death. This has some limited discussion of Shakespeare, too, especially Hamlet.
Two previous pieces in this series have discussed other aspects of Kristeva’s work:
Julia Kristeva’s portrait of Émile Benveniste in The Samurai – 19 April 2026
Tel Quel goes to China: Sollers, Kristeva, Barthes, Pleynet, Wahl and the Cultural Revolution – 3 May 2026
References
Mikhaïl Bakhtine, La Poétique de Dostoïevski, trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff, Paris: Seuil, 1970.
Mikhaïl Bakhtine, L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. Andrée Robel, Paris: Gallimard, 1970.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984 [1968].
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World: A New Translation, trans. Sergeiy Sandler, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary Volume I: 1873-1876, trans. Kenneth Lantz, London: Quartet, 1993.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary Volume II: 1877-1881, trans. Kenneth Lantz, London: Quartet, 1995.
Stuart Elden, “Through the Eyes of the Fantastic: Lefebvre, Rabelais and Intellectual History”, Historical Materialism10 (4), 2002, 89-111.
Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide”, in The Penguin Freud Library 14: Art and Literature, trans. D.F. Tait, ed. James Strachey, 1985, 435-60.
Elena Galtsova, “Les Présages”, Critique 905, 2022, 818-29.
Julia Kristeva, “Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue, le roman”, Critique 239, 1967, 438-65; reprinted in Shmeiwtikή: recherches pour une sémanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1969, 82-112; “Word, Dialogue and Novel”, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 64-91.
Julia Kristeva, “Une poétique ruinée”, in Mikhaïl Bakhtine, La Poétique de Dostoïevski, trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff, Paris: Seuil, 1970, 5-27; “The Ruin of a Poetics”, trans. Vivienne Mylne, in Russian Formalism. A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation eds. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973, 102-21.
Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, Paris: Seuil/Points, 1983 [1980]; Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancolie, Paris: Gallimard, 1987; Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia,trans. Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, trans. Jody Gladding, New York: Columba University Press, 2012.
Julia Kristeva, Dostoïevski, Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 2019; Dostoyevsky, or the Flood of Language, trans. Jody Gladding, New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
Julia Kristeva, Dostoïvski face à la mort, ou le Sexe hanté du langage, Paris: Fayard, 2021; Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex, trans. Armine Kotin Mortimer, New York: Columbia University, 2023.
Philippe Sollers, “Dostoïevski, Freud, la roulette”, Théorie des exceptions, Paris: Gallimard/Folio Essais, 1986, 57-73.
Samuel C. Still, “Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language by Julia Kristeva”, Christianity and Literature 72 (1), 2023, 87-91.
Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhaïl Bakhtine: Le principe dialogique, Paris: Seuil, 1981; Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
This is the 75th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm throughout 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
