In 1990, CUP published my book Dostoevsky after Bakhtin. When the reviews began to appear, I was not surprised to find that what most troubled some otherwise sympathetic Western readers was that I had tried in my final chapter to relate Dostoevsky's religious insights to a narrative structure that in many ways anticipated a post-modernist sensibility. In particular, it was my reintroduction of the notion of an originary truth (‘The Whisper of God’) into critical discourse that gave offence. Clearly, I was thought to have failed to grasp something essential (if that is not a contradiction in terms) about the post-modernist enterprise. The fault may well have been mine, but I suspect that some readers still secretly prefer a Dostoevsky whose religious insights, as in Soviet days though for quite different reasons, have been suppressed, or translated into the sort of discourse that is politically acceptable to them.

I am afraid that I remained incorrigible, and in my introduction to the Russian edition (1998), I went further, stating that if I were to rewrite the book now I should expand rather than delete that section. I was also aware by that time that some of my Russian readers, themselves adherents of a resurgent Orthodoxy that regards Dostoevsky as a great Christian prophet with a unique word for the twenty-first century, might take the opposite view, and consider me culpably neglectful of the religious dimension of his work.