Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience

While acknowledging Dostoevsky’s personal commitment to the Russian Orthodox faith, Jones argues that it is possible to understand his fictional world only in terms of the interplay of a wide variety of religious experiences and outlooks, including affirmations of faith and expressions of radical doubt and unbelief, and a constant questioning of one by the other. In their neglect of its outward expressions, Dostoevsky’s novels seem to acknowledge that the Orthodox tradition has to die in order to be reborn in the light of the image of Christ and that, to use his own expression, the final ‘hosanna’ must pass through a ‘furnace of doubt’.