The other day, Laura from “Getting Into Holy Water” had a post where she quoted Fyodor Dostoevsky. It got me thinking back to my college days… I had a few years where I was absolutely obsessed with Russian literature. College-Ryan exhausted the University of South Florida’s undergrad course offerings on Russian Lit, and Dostoevsky was his all-time favorite.
College-Ryan wrote this paper: “Blood Imagery in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.” It’s funny to look back and find a few theological points that I flubbed (and which my professor seems not to have caught), but on the whole, I realized: it was in doing the research for this paper that I first encountered serious arguments for the belief that the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Jesus. The timing of the paper is interesting, because I wrote it the semester before the events that I began my conversion story with (above under “The Long Road to Rome”). There’s always a “journey before the journey,” I suppose.
Dostoevsky would have hated it (he was a die-hard Slavophile), but his novels were a major step along my way to Rome…
Very interesting essay! I think I found the error you were referring to but at least it didn’t affect your argument at all. Also, love the idea of the novel and of all literature and play-acting more generally as “carnivalisation”!