ABSTRACT
John Hick's Evil and the God of Love served as the standard textbook on questions of evil and theodicy for several generations of UK students. Hick's footnote itself refers to what is generally taken as Dostoevsky's most powerful contribution to the theological debate about evil, namely, the chapter titled "Rebellion" in The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky did have some experience of some of the pathologies he describes, most notably his gambling addiction, which The Gambler describes in painful detail, although so far from offering a catharsis some of the worst episodes followed its completion. Unlike in Britain, Russia had at that time restricted the death penalty to cases of treason, which meant that the Siberian prison camp to which Dostoevsky was sent contained many who, in other countries, would certainly have been executed, including several multiple murderers.
