The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

In all his creative work, though particularly in his novels written after his time in exile at a labour camp, Dostoevsky creates very deep texts of the highest coherence. One of the causes, and his main aim, in writing this kind of text is his strategy of consciously “retreating” before the reader, with the goal of involving the reader into a non-judgmental space where ideas can be experienced as disengaged from the conscious ideological filters that shut off any reader’s change of encounter with a particular complex of ideas, which in Dostoevsky’s time as in ours, are primarily theological. In order to put his strategy of “retreat” into practice, the author places his “index finger, raised in passion” (a mark that Dostoevsky defines as a necessary quality of a good writer) in those areas that the reader would be able to discover only if he exerted specific effort, and readiness to strive toward images and in their depth, far beyond direct narrative. One of the most important fields for this kind of “placement” is quotation, particularly quotations of the Bible and Liturgical texts. The article demonstrates the presence of this strategy in Dostoevsky’s novels Humiliated and Insulted (also known in English as The Insulted and Humiliated) and The Brothers Karamazov, in which in diverse ways the writer tells the reader about a love that has gone astray, the sufferings it brings to those who follow it, and the means if returning love to its true path.