Dostoyevsky’s Most Terrifying Book

These were years of terrible solitude for him, but also of self-judgment and the beginnings of a spiritual regeneration. On leaving prison, he wrote to N. D. Fonvizina, the wife of a political exile who had given him a copy of the Gospels: Not because you are religious, but because I myself have experienced and felt it keenly, I will tell you that

It is perhaps true, however, that this proven, thousand-year-old instrument for the moral regeneration of mankind, elevating him from slavery to freedom and moral perfection, could become a double-edged sword, and that some could be led not to humility and ultimate self-mastery, but, on the contrary, to utterly satanic pride—that is, not to freedom

Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”