Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism: A Book Talk with Author Paul J. Contino

Author Paul J. Contino joins Fordham professor emeritus Terrence W. Tilley and Michael Ossorgin, Russian program director within the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, to discuss his book, Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ Among the Karamazovs (Cascade Books, 2020).

According to Cascade Books, “In this book, Paul Contino offers a theological study of Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He argues that incarnational realism animates the vision of the novel and the decisions and actions of its hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov. The book takes a close look at Alyosha’s mentor, the Elder Zosima, and the way his role as a confessor and his vision of responsibility ‘to all, for all’ develops and influences Alyosha. The remainder of the study, which serves as a kind of reader’s guide to the novel, follows Alyosha as he takes up the mantle of his elder, develops as a ‘monk in the world,’ and, at the end of three days, ascends in his vision of Cana. The study attends also to Alyosha’s brothers and his ministry to them: Mitya’s struggle to become a ‘new man’ and Ivan’s anguished groping toward responsibility. Finally, Contino traces Alyosha’s generative role with the young people he encounters and his final message of hope.”

Contino is a professor at Seaver College, Pepperdine University. He is the co-editor of Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (Northwestern University Press, 2001), edited and introduced with Susan Felch.

About the Speakers
Terrence W. Tilley, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of theology at Fordham. He previously taught at the University of Dayton, Florida State University, St. Michael’s College, and Georgetown University. He has edited three books and authored 10 books, scores of academic articles and chapters, and more than 100 book reviews. For more than 20 years, at least biennially, he taught a graduate seminar on the problem of evil, reading The Brothers Karamazov with colleagues and graduate students as part of those seminars. His most recent article is “The Fragility of Grace in the Karamazov World—And in Ours,” published in the journal Theological Studies in December 2020. He received the John Courtney Murray Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) in 2012. He was elected president of the CTSA, the College Theology Society, and the Society for Philosophy of Religion.

Michael Ossorgin, Ph.D., teaches Russian and comparative literature, art, theology, and language courses at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. He has published articles on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Notes From the Dead House. He is currently writing a book about the role of vision in Dostoevsky’s poetics, including individual chapters on Smerdiakov and Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov. He has been awarded Orthodox Christian Studies Center (OCSC) grants to design and teach OCSC-credited courses, including The Apocalypse: Russian and American Visions and The Russian Icon in Dialogue with the Arts. He is currently teaching a comparative course, Dostoevsky and Race in America, and will begin teaching the first of three summer courses in “The Great Russian Minds Series” this June on Mikhail Bakhtin, made possible with a grant from OCSC. Ossorgin is a member of the Dostoevsky Readers Advisory Board of the North American Dostoevsky Society.

This webinar is sponsored with support from the North American Dostoevsky Society and the Fordham Russian Forum. It is a part of the 2020-2021 North American Dostoevsky Society Bicentennial Speaker Series.