Dostoevsky

Abstract

This chapter will not decide whether Dostoevsky is properly read as either a religious or, more specifically, a Christian writer or thinker.1 More modestly, it aims merely to highlight and briefly comment on some of the elements in his work that provided a source and an inspiration for later nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious thought, both Russian and Western. Starting from Dostoevsky’s depiction of suffering, we shall move through his analysis of false responses to suffering to the possibility of redemption, the testimony of the Bible, and, finally, to the figure of Christ. In conclusion, I shall briefly comment on some of the main religious or theological responses to Dostoevsky by Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant commentators. Even the briefest survey, however, soon shows that there are significant divergences amongst interpreters, not least regarding Russia’s distinctive role in the economy of salvation. Like other great writers, Dostoevsky can be different things to different readers. A literary text is not a scientific research paper from which we might expect well-defined and unambiguous outcomes. As a field of manifold literary, existential, and spiritual possibilities, neither internal nor external differences derogate from its value or from its transcultural significance, however. On the contrary, they may be integral to it. It is because Shakespeare is richer with diverse possibilities than Webster that he remains more read and more performed-and much the same can be said of Dostoevsky and many of his Russian and non-Russian contemporaries.