Dostoevsky for Catholics (and Everyone Else), Part I, by Darrick Taylor

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Dostoevsky in Paris, 1863, The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1863. Black and white photograph. Public Domain. Created-1 January 1863.

By Darrick Taylor, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 23, 2023

Darrick Taylor earned his PhD in History from the University of Kansas. He lives in Central Florida and teaches at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL. He also produces a podcast, Controversies in Church History, dealing with controversial episodes in the history of the Catholic Church.

Dostoevsky represents one powerful reply to many of the cataclysmic changes that have swept modern Western civilization since the eighteenth century.

Few novelists have been feted with praise as much as the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Numerous intellectuals regarded him as the prophet of their age, quite literally. Albert Camus proclaimed Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx, the “prophet of the twentieth century.” The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche despised Christianity but admired the Orthodox Dostoevsky, saying he was “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”  ….

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