ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author talks about the religious implications of literary and philosophical texts of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. He was born in Moscow in 1821, the year Napoleon died, seven years before Tolstoy was born. His five greatest works are probably Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1867), The Idiot (1868), The Possessed (1871), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). He died in 1881. His novels, political and religious ideas are tempered by his uncanny understanding of human beings. Like few writers of any age, he makes his readers more humane by forcing them to sympathize with all kinds of men and women whom in real life one might pass by with contempt, void of understanding. The most interesting things Dostoevsky ever wrote about religion appear in The Brothers Karamazov, in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, in two successive chapters in which Ivan converses with his brother Alyosha.
