The Night School for Deeper Learning with Feodor Dostoevsky (Series VIII, Part III)

The Night School is an experience of deep thought. This spiritual exercise activates in those who attend a longing for more depth of life and cultivates in them a greater capacity to explore with intellect and feeling the profound riches of the deep Tradition. In each class, the group is introduced to a new “guest” who were/are profound thinkers or missionaries or musicians or architects or philosophers or painters or poets or theologians or mystics.

Our “Guest” for Part 3 of Series 8 is Feodor Dostoevsky. This Russian novelist is one of the greatest, most esteemed, novelists of world literature, whose book, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), often sits at #1 on scholarly Lists of the greatest novels ever written – “generally thought to be one of the finest novels ever written.” He suffered enormously throughout his life, which gives to his Christian perspective a grittiness and wisdom not available to those of such prodigious talent who are neither Christian nor acquainted with profoundest sorrow. One assessment of him notes:

“A profound psychologist and philosopher, Dostoyevsky depicted with remarkable insight the depth and complexity of the human soul. His powerful though generally humorless narrative style, his understanding of the intricacies of character, especially the pathological conscience, and his amplification of sin and redemption made him a giant among novelists and, in the realm of ideas, a precursor of Freudian psychological analysis.” [Paul Lagassé, Columbia University, The Columbia Encyclopedia (New York; Detroit: Columbia University Press; Sold and distributed by Gale Group, 2000).]

The commencement of his “mature” period as a novelist was marked by the publication of Notes from Underground (1864), in which the main character withdraws from “normal” human life on the surface of the Earth and commits to live out the rest of his life underground! As in the case of Job, Dostoyevsky enters this time of his enduring literary greatness at the same time as his own personal life was being torn apart and wrecked by suffering.

Please RSVP below.  This class will be held online via Zoom.

Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81153638637?pwd=NFJNZzVLVG95Ym9ua2NrclptMWxHUT09
Meeting ID: 811 5363 8637
Passcode: 747096