Cornerstone Festival 2007- Part 3

Another great seminar was led by Robert Inchausti, a professer of English and author. I enjoyed this seminar called Subversive Orthodoxy that analyzed a bit of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn in the first session I will summarize. In later sessions he talked about Walker Percy, Wendall Berry, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul and Rene Girard. You can learn about all of these "outlaws, revolutionaries, and other christians in disguise" in his book which I started reading this week.

Dostoevsky focused much of his life to the psychology of the underground; the premise of if one is asserting choice or reason, they will ultimately choose their will and give it a beautiful reason. He asked questions like can a person really put their conscience away and committ a crime or will it turn around and bite back at us? (ex. Crime and Punishment). His novels sought to answer radical kinds of questions. The underground likes dark corners, and will often choose identity over truth.

I love the story he reminded me of from his last novel, The Brother's Karamozov, where Zossimov met with women on Fridays for counseling sessions. Two women came to visit him. One rich with little faith and one poor woman with large faith. The poor woman could not stop grieving for the death of her baby and so Zossimov told her that her baby wants her to grieve longer and when he is ready for her to stop, he will send her a sign. This helped the woman. The rich woman wanted him to explain the doctrine of eternal life, so that she could enjoy her earthly things right now. He said to her that she's got it backwards. It is not understood intellectually before you love people, but you love people and then you see it in their eyes. The woman cried because she didn't understand and knew he wouldn't have an answer for her. He told her to invite the first woman to dinner and show love. He is trying to show her truth and yet she is choosing her identity.

Another question he sought to answer is how do you love without it having a secret recompanse or to make one feel better than someone else? One of the answers to this question is sometimes let someone have their say and if the only way for someone to feel good is to put you down maybe that's the only way to get the dialogue going. Another story from Brother's Karamozov that he references to is when Alyosha found a crowd of boys fighting and the boy he helped bit him on the finger. He finds out one of his brother's beat that same boy before and had ridiculed him. So Alyosha went back to the boy's Father and offered him two hundred roubles. He said no one would ever know of it. The father ended up throwing the money down and running away. My thought is that hubris, (on the parts of both of the characters) created a situation where redemption could not break through the clouds in the sky.

That was about all he said about Dostoevsky. I find it interesting that Robert Inchausti himself did not encounter this novel in its entirety until he was out of college. The only part he read in college was the Grand Inquisitor's attack to the church. What a shame! I have a literature major as well and yet did not encounter many of the incredible novels that have impressed me the most until after college was done and over with. Dostoevsky is one of my favorite writers, so I was pleased he began his series discussing him.

The next Russian author he focused on in this first workshop is Solzhenitzen. He couldn't be published because he didn't join the Communist Party. He was sent to prison for writing a letter about Stalin being an idiot. He wrote in his head as he marched and had every fifth line rhyme so he could remember his writing later when he wrote on paper. He would cut out the vowels to save space and write on tiny scrolls that he would hide in his cell. Writing for him was a spiritual search in truthtelling.

In the 1950's he got cancer and had radiation. He called his ex-wife to his side and asked her to get his writing so that it would not go undiscovered and she said no. A bit bitter I guess! Then he got well, which he always believed was divine intervention. He got a job as a high school english teacher and wrote at night outside his home. He buried one sheet at a time in tin cans in his backyard. He called Tolstoy's sister in Kansas and told her if he was arrrested to wait five years and then go and dig out his writing.

One thing he said was "if you can't write without a pencil on the tundra- you've got nothing to say."

He ended up eventually later in life making Jimmy Carter's wife mad, staying in New Hampshire and then going back to Russia. He got a TV show where he basically spent his time ranting. Kind of a sad way to end such a dramatic story...

If I have the energy I may write about one of his other sessions I was able to catch. For now, I am trying to absorb what he had to say and get through his book. I found this speaker very intelligent and would like to have been at every session he had, but in the world of Cornerstone, it is impossible to see and do it all.