Metropolitan Anthony (Packanich) tells about faith in the life of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

For many generations, the novels of F. M. Dostoevsky, of a deep reader of the human heart and Christian prophet, of a genius who forms a spiritual bridge between the earthly and the eternal, they have been, and they remain as a life-giving source of the Orthodox faith, as the power that straightens and regenerates each of us.

"Our nation are great and beautiful because it believes, and because it has the Orthodoxy," the writer will say, and in his notebook he will note: "Delve in the Orthodoxy: it is not only ecclesiasticism and ritual, it is a living feeling that has turned our people into one of those basic living forces without which nations do not live. In actual fact, in Russian Christianitythere is not even mysticism at all, there is the one humanity in it, the one image of Christ – at least, this is the main thing."

Many saints of the XX century, for example, Justin Popović, called the writer as their teacher, and in the 1970s, when churches suddenly began to be fulled with young people, many to the question "Why?" answered: «We read Dostoevsky».

Fyodor Mikhailovich, who learned in the childhood to read from the "One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories of the Old and New Testaments", especially remembered the deacon who taught the Law of God his brothers and him, a 6-year-old, touching their hearts.

About four years of hard labor for accusing of reading Belinsky's atheistic letter to Gogol, on which Dostoevsky had no way to write, and the one book he had was the Bible, he recalled: "I understood myself there... understood the Christ... I understood and felt the Russian man..."

And on December 22, 1849, when the death sentence was announced to him, the writer perceived the unexpected pardon as a resurrection: "When I look back at the past and think about how much time was wasted, how much of it was lost in errors, mistakes, idleness, inability to live; how I did not value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit, so my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could be a century of happiness... Now, changing my life, I’m rebirthing into a new form...".

Dostoevsky's works literally penetrate the Holy Scripture. The special interest, as it's known, the Book of Job sparked, whose tragic burden of experience was familiar to the writer: «I'm reading the book of Job, and it’s leading me to painful delight: I stop reading and walk around the room for an hour, almost crying..."

At the same time, Dostoevsky's religiosity was dappled with doubts common to every seeking person. The writer confesses in his diaries: "... I believe in Christ and confess Him not as a boy, but my hosanna went through a big crucible of doubts...", and in a letter to A. Maikov he will say that the question of the existence of God was the main question that he "suffered consciously and unconsciously all his life."

Dostoevsky's novels vividly show the search for faith by a man in whose heart, according to the writer, the devil fights with God like on a battlefield, and the collapse of any human actions based on lack of faith and the absence of the Creator is outlined. Characters who have stepped into the darkness of sin, which is a stench, even so tend to go for the light. Let’s remember the «outlaw» Raskolnikov , killing the percenter Alyona Ivanovna in order to prove that he "is not a trembling creature, and he has the right" to satisfy his pride. The pregnant sister of the old woman accidentally witnesses what is happening – and as a result, Raskolnikov will destroy three souls. The terrible suffers of conscience will torment the character. However, Dostoevsky is sure, "conscience without God is a horror, it can get lost to the most immoral." Exactly by the words of Porfiry Petrovich, that «suffering is a great thing», the writer not only debunks the idea of a "superman", but also returns Raskolnikov to a different life with the help of the active love of Sonechka Marmeladova. The killer forces Sonechka to read the story of Lazarus' resurrection. Evil, according to the author, helps the strings of good to sound in the soul of the most desperate sinner, because his image also conceals the beauty of the Lord in depth. That's why «Crime and punishment» have a symbolic ending: "But that is the beginning of a new story — the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration…»

The death of his youngest son was one of the reasons why Dostoevsky made a trip to Optina Pustyn, where he met the elder Ambrose. According to his memoirs, after a conversation in the cell "about many pressing issues of spiritual life and the salvation of the soul", he left the following characteristic about the writer: "This is a repentant person", seeing in him a deep humility that helps to achieve the main goal of Christian life – love.

Working on his latest novel, «The Brothers Karamazov», Dostoevsky formulated his main task in this way and, in our opinion, successfully completed it: "The Church as a positive social ideal should have been the central idea of the new novel ..." The Church, which’s goal is to reunite people into the unity they have lost, where everyone would be like Christ. As an epigraph to the novel, Dostoevsky takes the words from the Gospel of John: "Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." The Easter metaphorical meaning of this phrase is the key not only to the Brothers Karamazov, but also to the entire work of the writer as a parable about spiritual death and spiritual rebirth, about man and Christ, about earthly existence and the Church. Dostoevsky is sure that there is no someone’s and your own sin, and through the words of elder Zosima, of the "ideal Christian", who embodied the features of the holy fathers Tikhon of Zadonsk, Ambrose of Optina, and preaches eternal biblical laws, instructs: "... Make yourself a bearer of responsibility for all human sin... because as soon as you make yourself a sincere bearer of responsibility for everything and for everyone, you will immediately see that it really is, and that you are to blame for everyone and for everything." All human actions, according to the writer, should be measured with the Christ’s ones, otherwise, following the logic of Ivan Karamazov: "If God does not exist, then everything is permissible" — sin triumphs and there is no salvation. Dostoevsky teaches us communion with God, the ability to see the image of God in everyone. Anyone, according to the writer's formula, having cleansed himself from the disguise of sin, is called to become like Christ, putting himself in second place before his neighbor, serving him. Thanks to Prince Myshkin from the novel "The Idiot", the characters receive their human bondage. Myshkin literally implements the commandment «You shall love your neighbor as yourself».

Uncompromisingly following the gospel truths, Dostoevsky composed a Symbol of Faith for himself: "... there is nothing more beautiful, deeper, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous and more perfect than Christ, and it's not only there is not but with jealous love I tell myself that there cannot be. Moreover, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if it really was  that the truth is outside of Christ, then I would rather stay with Christ than with the truth."