ABSTRACT
A great number of books have been written, especially in the last few years, about Dostoevsky's religion. Mr Murry is right in saying that Dostoevsky was not a Christian. Belief in God as a person, the faith of the Christian religion, was impossible to him for two main reasons namely unbelief and scepticism. In The Idiot Myshkin and Rogozhin halt together before a picture of Christ at the moment when he is taken from the Cross. According to Shatov, Stavrogin is an atheist. It has lost his social instincts. Stavrogin is a work of art; one should not look at him as an exhibit as a specimen in a psychological laboratory. The great dilemma which recurs so often in his work, 'If God does not exist then all things are lawful', the dilemma which drove Ivan Karamazov mad, never gave up its secret to him, yet it is really not a dilemma but a riddle, a verbal ambiguity.
