Professor Wim Coudenys made a presentation entitled "The Russian Soul of the Catholic Action. Dostoevskii in Belgium in the 1920s and 1930s”

The presentation by Wim Coudenys, Professor of Russian and European Cultural History at the University of Leuven (Belgium), on the Belgian reception of Dostoevskii took place on April 10. The speaker specializes in Belgian–Russian relations, Russian emigration history and Russian historiography.

After the First World War, Dostoevskii became something of a hype in Western Europe. It was thought that his work would help people to process the traumatic experiences of the First World War. In Belgium, however, Dostoevskii fascinated readers for a completely different reason: his plea for an active role of religion in an increasingly secularized society appealed to Belgian Catholic thinkers, protagonists of the ‘Catholic Action’ who wanted to put Catholicism at the centre of social, political and cultural life. On both sides of the linguistic border – Belgium having a French and Dutch-speaking community – Dostoevskii, and eventually all things Russian, were at the centre of the debates around the ‘Catholic novel’; at a certain moment, it was even suggested that Soviet literary politics might serve as a model for Catholic literature! Although by the end of the 1930s, the interest in Dostoevskii as a source of inspiration started to wane, the discussions of the 1920s and 1930s deeply influenced the Belgian (Catholic) perception of Russia and its legendary ‘soul’.