Christianity in Crime and Punishment

Christianity in Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, " If someone succeded in proving to me that

Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, then

I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth" (Frank 68). It was by no

means easy for Dostoyevsky to reach this conclusion. In Dostoyevsky's life, one

sees that of an intellectual Prodigal Son, returning to the Father In Heaven

only after all other available systems of belief have been exhausted. Reared in

a devout Russian Orthodox home, Dostoyevsky as a young man rebelled against his

upbringing and embraced the anarchist (and atheistic) philosophies of the

intelligentsia, radical students and middle class intellectuals violently

opposed to the status quo in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Morsm 50). Dostoyevsky

revolutionary stirrings were not unnoticed by the Tsar's secret police, and, in

1849, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to a mock execution followed by ten years' hard

labor in a Siberian prison (Morsm 50).

One critic said "It has been customary to say that Dostoyevsky re-learnt

Christianity in prison." (A Boyce Gibson 19.) There, out of his element and

surrounded by hardened criminals, he had plenty of time to contemplate life and

read The New Testament (the only book he was allowed). However, it was not until

his compulsory army service that Dostoyevsky's faith began to blossom. In the

army, Dostoyevsky met a fellow officer and devout Christian named Baron von

Vrangel, who befriended the still young Dostoevesky and helped him re-discover

the Christian faith (Frank 4).

Although a professing Christian for the rest of his life, Dostoyevsky

was not a "plaster saint." (Until he died, he was plagued by doubts and a

passion for gambling.) Instead, Dostoyevsky understood, perhaps better than any

other great Christian author, that his faith was created and sustained by one

thing only: the grace of God.

It is of such grace that Dostoyevsky writes in Crime and Punishment.

Although most critics agree that Crime and Punishment's theme is not as

deliberately Christian as Dostoyevsky's latter works, the novel's voice is still

authentically Christian. Written in 1864, shortly after Dostoyevsky lost his

first wife, his brother, and a close friend (Gibson 32); Crime and Punishment