![]() However, it was not until his compulsory army service that Dostoyevsky’s faith began to blossom. 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). One critic said It has been customary to say that Dostoyevsky re-learnt Christianity in prison. 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). ![]() ![]() 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 ntelligentsia, radical students and middle class intellectuals violently opposed to the status quo in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Morsm 50). 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. It was by no means easy for Dostoyevsky to reach this conclusion. 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). ![]()
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