Dostoevsky defended the Orthodox Christian faith, the reconciliation between the educated elite of Russia and the people, and a Christian mission for the country, and he fought until the end against socialism and revolutionary rationalism, which he himself had embraced in his youth.
The turn came in 1849. Arrested because of the Petrashevsky circle and then, for four years of hard labor among peasant prisoners who hated the nobles, he lost hope that the people would follow a revolution made by intellectuals, and he returned from Siberia with his faith reaffirmed. In 1861 he launched with his brother the magazine Vremya, which preached a return to the soil (pochvennichestvo), the approach of the Europeanized elite to the people and their faith. In 1864, in Notes from Underground, he responded to the utopian novel What Is to Be Done?, by Chernyshevsky.
In the 1870s, in A Writer's Diary, he defended Russia's Christian mission and the cause of the Slavs of the Balkans. He became a monarchist, a friend of the reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and was received at court. In the speech on Pushkin, in June 1880, he spoke of the universal vocation of the Russian people, and the audience went wild. He also believed that the moral improvement of each person, not political action, would be the basis of a better society.
It is worth separating the journalist from the novelist. In the novels, ideas contrary to his own are exposed with full force, and he wrote to his editor that the answer to Ivan Karamazov's argument would come in the fate of the characters, not in a counterargument. And the same Diary holds his documented anti-Semitism, dealt with in a separate question.
On Clavis: Crime and Punishment.