This is the first full-length study in English of Camus's life-long fascination with the works of the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate the ways in which Dostoevsky's thought and fiction served to stimulate and crystallize Camus's own thinking. Davison lucidly identifies the lines of divergence and counter-arguments which Camus produced as answers to the challenge of Dostoevsky's Christian/Tzarist vision of life.
The traditional methods of comparative literary criticism are jettisoned in favour of the more exciting claim that Camus's literary and philosophical texts can be read as precise and detailed replies to some of Dostoevsky's central beliefs about immortality, religion and politics. The study ranges freely over the entirety of the works of both major writers.
is Lecturer in French, University of Exeter. His published work includes an edition of Albert Camus's L'Etranger and Simone de Beauvoir's Une Mort très douce.
“Through detailed and lucid analysis of Camus's texts, Davison traces the impact that the Russian works had on Camus's intellectual development and highlights his attempts at forging a counter-discourse. . . Readers will welcome the clarity of analysis and exposition of complex ideas in the 'world of ideas and politics' and the flexible chronology which shows Camus engaging with Dostoevsky at different stages as novelist/philosopher of the absurd, as Christian humanist and, finally, as prophet of twentieth-century political nihilism and totalitarianism. Even more welcome, perhaps, is his ability to uncover something of the complex dynamism, the excitement and the frustration in that relation. . . Camus himself claimed that one cannot understand twentieth-century French literature without reference to Dostoevsky, and in tracing the way Camus wrestled with him intellectually, Davison has, perhaps, put in place the flC*
![Camus The Challenge of Dostoevsky [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/9/9/5/2_1424602.jpg)