Fiodor Dostoïevski
A novelist who stages, through his characters, the great questions of faith, freedom and evil.
Life
Russian novelist (Moscow 1821 - Saint Petersburg 1881). Sentenced to death in 1849 for taking part in a discussion circle, he was pardoned at the last moment and spent four years in a Siberian prison camp. His novels, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, set characters who embody ideas against each other: faith and atheism, freedom and obedience, crime and guilt. The formula "if God does not exist, everything is permitted", which sums up Ivan's words in The Brothers Karamazov without appearing there word for word, has become a well-known shorthand for the debate on morality without God.
Main works
A novel in which three brothers and an illegitimate son confront faith, doubt and the murder of a father; it contains the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
A poor student commits a murder in the name of a theory, then is eaten up by guilt.
The monologue of a man who refuses to let reason and self-interest explain everything about human beings.
A novel about a group of revolutionaries in a provincial town, showing the damage done by ideas pushed to the end.
In his own words
« Yes, that was my contention. There is no virtue if there is no immortality. »
Да, я это утверждал. Нет добродетели, если нет бессмертия.
« Yes, if you like, "everything is permitted", since the word has been said. I do not deny it. »
Да, пожалуй: «всё позволено», если уж слово произнесено. Не отрекаюсь.
« It is not God that I do not accept, Alyosha, I only most respectfully return him the ticket. »
Не бога я не принимаю, Алеша, я только билет ему почтительнейше возвращаю.
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe wrote that if someone proved to him that Christ was outside the truth, he would rather stay with Christ than with the truth.
Dostoevsky, Letter to N. D. Fonvizina (February 1854)
Human beings insist on their own will even against their own interest; freedom is a burden people try to hand over, as the Grand Inquisitor shows.
Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864); The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Through Ivan and Zosima the novel presents good and evil as binding only if grounded in God and immortality; the author sides with Zosima.
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
In his letters and novels faith comes before argument; Ivan's rational case against God is answered by lives of faith, not by a counter-proof.
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Without a faith that gives life a given meaning, his characters sink into despair or crime; with it they find a reason to love and to live.
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866); The Brothers Karamazov (1880)