Conversations with Dostoevsky

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Conversations with Dostoevsky is a series of fictional conversations taking place between November 2018 and spring 2019 in the narrator’s Glasgow apartment and elsewhere in the city. Starting with Dostoevsky’s story A Gentle Spirit, the conversations spell out Dostoevsky’s response to the vision of a loveless world with which the story ends and move on to his advocacy of faith in God, Christ, and immortality. The themes discussed include suicide, truth and lies, guilt, determinism, literature, the Bible, Mary, Christ, Dostoevsky and film, ‘the woman question’, nationalism, the Church, the Jewish question, immortality, and God. The main text is accompanied by a series of commentaries that contextualize the issues discussed in the conversations with references to his novels, journalism, letters, and notebooks as well as engaging the relevant critical literature. The work is not a conventional academic study and instead of chapters there are (fictional) ‘conversations’ followed by a series of ‘commentaries’. This should be clear in what follows, although the abstracts/keywords format does not in all cases facilitate representation of the fluid nature of the ‘conversations’.</jats:p>