In a letter written after his release from a Siberian prison camp, in 1854, Fyodor Dostoyevsky defined himself as “a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt”. The materialism, nihilism, and atheism which spasmed across 19th-century Russia, forces which Dostoyevsky vehemently fought against in his writings, are those which underpin modern liberalism in our own period of disbelief and doubt. Yet, this is not the only way in which Dostoyevsky’s work chimes with contemporary life.
Rather, his themes of freedom, faith, nationalism, family breakdown and suicide link into very modern cultural concerns. At a moment of surging popularity, Dostoyevsky’s prophetic nature has come into sharper focus. The works of this complicated figure reverberate powerfully in our own conflicted era, as the allure of Russian literature continues to grip the Western imagination.
Whatever way you look at it, Dostoyevsky has struck a chord with a new generation of readers. The top-selling Penguin Classic last year — helped by hype on social media community “BookTok” — was his novella White Nights (1848), while the publisher’s sales of The Brothers Karamazov (1880) and Crime and Punishment (1866) have roughly tripled since 2020.
This growing interest is the latest stage in a reputation which has changed significantly over time, both during the author’s lifetime and after his death in 1881. After the rapturous reception of Dostoyevsky’s debut novel Poor Folk (1846), his second The Double (1846) was poorly reviewed and was followed by more than a decade in the wilderness. Dostoyevsky only really achieved lasting popular glory in Russia towards the end of his life.
Literary luminaries have come to quite different conclusions about Dostoyevsky and his legacy. Albert Camus believed that “the real 19th-century prophet was Dostoyevsky, not Karl Marx”, while E.M. Forster argued that “no English novelist explored man’s soul as deeply”. On the other hand, Joseph Conrad complained that “there is a certain foul stench emanating from Dostoyevsky’s works that I cannot endure”.
Given his reputation as an arch-reactionary, for those new to Dostoyevsky it can be a shock to discover that he had a liberal past. It was interest in French utopian socialism which led him into a revolutionary group connected with the radical Petrashevsky Circle in St Petersburg. This resulted in his arrest in 1849, a last-minute reprieve from death by firing squad, and banishment to Siberia with only the New Testament to read.
Dostoyevsky later wrote with contempt of the period when “I transformed myself into a ‘European liberal’”. The liberalism he reacted against was the Russian nihilism of the 19th-century, which took the path of negation and cast aside all tradition and moral restraint through its faulty vision of progress. This nihilism, which entered the Russian psyche more widely with Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862), arguably has deep similarities to 21st-century liberalism: both in its scientific utopianism and its vision of materialism as a means of providing fundamental values.
Devils (1872) is Dostoyevsky’s great attack on nihilism. In the novel, the maniacal Peter Verkhovensky speaks gleefully of revolutionary terror: “A Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes gouged out, a Shakespeare will be stoned”. The “devils” of nihilism and materialism lead Peter and his band of motley radicals to murder and self-destruction in provincial 19th-century Russia. In his portrait of a nihilistic descent into chaos in the pursuit of absolute freedom, Dostoyevsky anticipated the totalitarianism of 20th-century Bolshevism.
The novel, which despite its dark plot is full of buffoonish and slapstick moments, was a response to real events and intellectual forces. Dostoyevsky based the murder of Ivan Shatov — a member of the slapdash revolutionary group who manages to free himself from its nihilistic grip — on revolutionary Sergei Nechaev’s killing of a student who had turned against him. Inspired by Nechaev, the radical Vera Zasulich would shoot the governor of St Petersburg; Oscar Wilde based a play on her.
Dostoyevsky’s answer to materialism and liberalism was Holy Russia. With his belief in the spiritual superiority of the Russian nation, and Orthodoxy as the only expression of pure and undefiled Christianity, his faith took a jingoistic form. Dostoyevsky called for Constantinople to be reclaimed as the centre of Orthodoxy, and supported Russia’s attempts to reclaim lost territory from the Crimean War. His sometimes-exaggerated voice can be found in the mouth of Shatov: “Only one nation is ‘god-bearing,’ that’s the Russian people”.
“Dostoyevsky’s answer to materialism and liberalism was Holy Russia.”
This worldview provokes discomfort in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — though it would surely be unfair to second-guess exactly what Dostoyevsky’s own take would be on the conflict. Either way, at a time of growing nationalism and political extremes, Dostoyevsky’s messianic politics are of particular pertinence in his native country. Vladimir Putin, who has attempted to justify contemporary Russian messianism by pointing to Prince Vladimir’s baptism in Kyiv in 988 as the birth of Holy Russia, has equally singled out Dostoyevsky as a writer of the Russian “heart” opposed to the “pragmatic” West.
It’s impossible here to understand Dostoyevsky and downplay his Christianity. While he explores religion through a heavy dose of doubt and spiritual desolation, and often spoke of faith through contradiction, it would be a fundamental misreading to consider him as some sort of doubt-ridden agnostic. After all, if he doesn’t provide formal arguments for the existence of God, he does paint a picture of a world in which the choices and consequences of belief and unbelief tell their own story. His own position, in the corner of faith, shines through in the often dark and terrible episodes of his novels, in intellectual distress, madness, murder, suicide, and rape.
This religious perspective is again being read at an interesting cultural moment. The New Atheist consensus of the early 21st century is under serious strain. That’s echoed by an uptick in interest in traditional forms of Christianity amongst the young: a recent YouGov survey found that 16% of 18-24-year-olds in the UK attend church at least monthly, up from 4% in 2018, while young adult converts drove the French Catholic Church’s record number of baptisms last Easter. There are Reddit threads about how reading Dostoyevsky has inspired new Christian conversions, while contemporary Christian figures from Pope Francis to Rowan Williams have cited him as a figure of significant spiritual interest (the former Archbishop of Canterbury even wrote a book on him).
This brings us to The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s final and greatest novel. This is a profound exploration of faith, morality and freedom, centred on patricide, suffering and moral uncertainty through the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and the violently different outlooks and experiences of his four sons.
The novel contains the famous poem of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”. This is told by the intellectual Ivan, who is tormented by the problem of evil, to his novice monk brother Alyosha. Christ returns to earth in 16th-century Seville and is arrested by the Inquisitor, who is fresh from burning heretics. The Inquisitor tells Christ that he got freedom wrong. Humanity would’ve been happier if he had accepted the Devil’s temptations in the desert. The masses cannot handle freedom, but want bread, miracles and strongman authority. “Those same people who today kissed your feet will tomorrow at one wave of my hand rush to rake up the embers on your bonfire.” Christ is silent throughout the Inquisitor’s elocutions. Finally, he “quietly kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips”. With a shudder, the Inquisitor turns him out.
The poem gets to the heart of 20th-century totalitarianism and the conflict between freedom and secure contentment which lies at the centre of modern liberalism. All the while, it foreshadows 20th-century dystopian literature from authors like Huxley and Orwell. It also highlights the sometimes-paradoxical approach of Dostoyevsky to religious truth: the critic Konstantin Leontiev wrote that “the beautiful fantasy” of the Legend displayed Dostoyevsky’s “mistaken, false and obscure” view of Christianity.
This should not be a surprise, for like any prophet, Dostoyevsky has paradoxes. While cultural context can’t be ignored, it is galling that a writer who explores suffering humanity in such astounding depth could fall foul of base antisemitism. In response to a question in The Brothers Karamazov about whether Jews steal and kill Christian children at Easter, Alyosha replies with a simple “I don’t know”. That is quite the glib treatment of blood libel.
Then there is Dostoyevsky’s anti-Catholicism, evident in the Legend, which was tied up with his antipathy towards the West and reached absurd heights. Prince Myshkin in his novel The Idiot spouts Dostoyevsky’s own view that the Catholic Church “is even worse than atheism itself”. Ecumenical Dostoyevsky was not, even if I don’t feel this diminishes the power of his literary apologia for Christianity.
Despite these tensions — and the misguided calls to boycott all Russian culture in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion — classic Russian literature has maintained a deep hold on the Western mind. Russia is a European country which in its anti-liberal traditions is fundamentally not of the West, which gives it a definite sense of strangeness and otherness. While Russia in some ways feels like a not-so-distant cousin, its soul seems exotic, even incomprehensible. The familiar yet unfamiliar spiritual and political forces contained within the grand Russian novels, explored against the backdrop of the extremities of the nation’s history, have proven durably enticing.
As for Dostoyevsky himself, there is something dark and dangerous, perhaps even depraved, about his work which makes him more relevant to contemporary readers than even Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. The violent realism of his writing and its frantic existentialism fits strangely well into modern literary appetites, while his anti-capitalism is surely appealing to young readers exhausted by the desperate failures of contemporary mainstream politics. Plenty, in short, for new children of doubt to grapple with.
