Dostoevsky “met” the Christ of the Gospels in the prison of Omsk. He also met there a young man named Ilyinsky,

The coexistence of faith and unbelief indeed remained with Dostoevsky all his life;

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

Dmitri Karamazov. And because it expresses so clearly the “irrational” value of life and the purifying effect of suffering, central themes of Dostoevsky’s later work, which he knew first of all from experience.

eight years of penal servitude,

This idea has entered into my flesh and blood. Yes, it’s true! That head which created, lived by the highest life of art, which acknowledged and had come to know the highest demands of the spirit, that head has been cut from my shoulders. Memory remains, and the images I have created and still not molded in flesh. They will leave their harsh mark o

Brother, I’m not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, ever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter—this is what life is, herein lies its task. I

three decades earlier, however, on April 23, 1849, Dostoevsky had been arrested along with other members of a secret utopian society and sentenced to death. The emperor Nikolai I, father of Alexander II, changed the sentence but ordered that the reprieve be announced only at the last minute. After eight months in the Petropavlovsky Fortress,

he delivered an address on the poet Pushkin which brought him enormous public acclaim.