Conversations with Dostoevsky

Conversations with Dostoevsky presents a series of fictional conversations taking place between November 2018 and Spring 2019 in the narrator''s Glasgow apartment and elsewhere in the city. At the beginning of the conversations, the narrator has been reading Dostoevsky''s story A Gentle Spirit, which concludes with a dramatic statement of protest atheism. This statement suggests that love is not possible in a purely mechanical universe in which all living beings are condemned to death and ultimate extinction. The conversations spell out Dostoevsky''s response to this view and 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, war, the Church, the Jewish question, immortality, and God. In addition to conversations between the narrator and Dostoevsky, we drop in on a dinner party at which Dostoevsky is discussed from