One of the deepest psychological novelists in any language — a Russian writer who, after a staged mock execution in 1849 and four years in a Siberian prison camp, came back a believing Orthodox Christian. Crime and Punishment, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov press a single terrifying question: if God is dead, is anything forbidden? He gave the case against God its fullest force, then answered it not with argument but with the image of freely chosen love. The same man who wrote with such compassion also voiced ugly antisemitism in his journalism — a contradiction his legacy has never resolved.
In 1849 a young Russian writer stood in a frozen square in front of a firing squad, waiting to be shot. The first men in his group were tied to posts. Then a horseman galloped up with an order: the Tsar had spared them. It had been staged from the start, a piece of cruelty meant to terrify. Fyodor Dostoevsky went from that square to four years in a Siberian prison camp, and he came out changed: a believing Christian who had stared into the worst of himself and his fellow prisoners. He spent the rest of his life writing novels about murderers, suicides, and saints, asking one question over and over. If there is no God, and no judgment after death, then is anything forbidden? Through his characters he pressed the terrifying question — if God is dead, is everything permitted? — and then spent hundreds of pages fighting the answer.