Christian fiction and religious realism in the novels of dostoevsky (anthem series on russian, east european and eurasian studies)

This study offers a literary analysis and theological evaluation of the Christian themes in the five great novels of Dostoevsky - 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', 'The Adolescent', 'The Devils' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. Dostoevsky's ambiguous treatment of religious issues in his literary works strongly differs from the slavophile Orthodoxy of his journalistic writings. In the novels Dostoevsky deals with Christian basic values, which are presented via a unique tension between the fictionality of the Christian characters and the readers' experience of the existential reality of their religious problems. Wil van den Bercken is a Slavist and professor of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.