Dostoevsky left no philosophical system, but novels in which ideas are put to the test in the body of those who defend them. What is called his philosophy is a wager: that the human being does not fit into a formula, that the heart that rejects Christ is capable of reaching extremes, and that only the life of whoever carries an idea shows what it is worth.
The biographer Joseph Frank calls this an eschatological imagination: putting ideas into action and following them to their final consequences. It is the student who kills for a theory, the revolutionaries who put the cause in God's place, the brothers who argue over whether everything is permitted. In Crime and Punishment, Razumikhin sums up the refusal that runs through the work: "A living soul will ask for life, a living soul will not submit to mechanics." Dostoevsky himself claimed the underground as his glory, the place from which man contests the calculated utopia.
On method, he wrote to his editor, about the Grand Inquisitor, that Ivan's argument would not be answered with another argument, but by the fate of the characters and by the last words of the elder Zosima. Hence one speaks of an indirect refutation.
Readers disagree about the outcome. For Albert Camus, in the end the Christian defeats the novelist: whoever formulates the absurd with the most precision answers with faith. For Frank and for Dostoevsky himself, it is a faith that passed through the strongest negation and is therefore not naive. Otto Maria Carpeaux sees a convert who never took the step of faith.
On Clavis: Crime and Punishment.