God, ethics, and the novel: Dostoevsky and Vasily Grossman

摘要

This essay explores how Dostoevsky, in the four great novels of his maturity (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov) and Vasily Grossman, the author of the Tolstoyan, Soviet-era novel Life and Fate, both attempt to “think God” (penser Dieu), as Emmanuel Levinas puts it, on the basis of ethics (à partir de l’éthique), outside of the question of ontology—outside, that is, of the question of God’s existence or non-existence.