In a novel tasked with depicting the ‘positively good man’, it is significant that the majority of characters who are characterized as ‘good’ in The Idiot are consistently described as children, whether they be actual children, naïve adults, or terminally…
Dostoevsky offers many interesting theological threads to follow in The Idiot, and, for me, amid all of its chaotic conversations I found a compelling account of communion in the dialogic partnership of Prince Myshkin and Lizaveta Prokofievna. This account was…
I. Henri de Lubac observes that ‘Dostoevsky’s books abound in atheists’. [1] The novelist explores the ‘psychology of unbelief’ by making many of his most arresting characters non-believers and nihilists. [2] George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson offer that Dostoevsky…
In a letter written in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky gives a memorable account of the self as an obstacle to the act of Christ-like love: To love a person, as oneself, according to Christ’s commandment, is impossible. The law of the…
Many may wonder if the dogmatic claims in doctrinal statements such as the Apostle’s Creed are still true or relevant to the lives of modern Christians. Joseph Ratzinger takes up this question in his introduction to Christianity and concludes that…
‘Well that’s … the sort of thing you read about in novels! Prince, darling, that’s all old-fashioned nonsense, the world has grown wiser nowadays’. [1] Thus declares Nastasya Filippovna of Prince Myshkin’s marriage proposal in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Nastasya’s remark…
‘I can’t understand how one can pass a tree and not be happy at seeing it! Talk to a man and not be happy at loving him! … Look into the eyes that look at you and love you’. [1]…
‘Is it right, Prince, that you once said the world would be saved by “beauty”?’ ‘What is there for me in all this beauty, when I am forced to be aware every minute, every second, that even this tiny fly…
Editor’s note: This article by ITIA Lecturer Rebekah Lamb begins our series on ‘Dostoevsky and Christian Doctrine’. Dr. Lamb explains the genesis of the series after the essay’s conclusion. ‘[B]eing sent to prison was the best thing that ever happened…