Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian, and he made faith the center of his life and of his books, a faith that he himself described as having passed through doubt, not ignorance.
The house in which he grew up was devout, and the boy learned to read from sacred stories. As a child he came to know the Book of Job, which he said had marked him forever. In 1847 he broke with the critic Belinsky, in part for refusing his atheism. On the way to prison, at Tobolsk, the wives of exiled Decembrists gave the condemned men a copy of the New Testament, the only book allowed in the prison, and he kept it until his death.
On leaving Omsk, he wrote to Natalia Fonvizina a profession of faith that is the key to almost everything that came afterward: he called himself a son of the doubt and unbelief of the century, but affirmed that if they proved to him that Christ was outside the truth, he would prefer to stay with Christ. In his last notebooks he returned to the same choice and, in a draft reply to Kavelin, denied that he believed like a child: his hosanna, he wrote, came from the great crucible of doubt. In 1878, after the death of his son Alyosha, he visited the Optina Monastery, and the consolation he heard from Elder Ambrose became a scene in The Brothers Karamazov. Before dying, he opened the New Testament from Tobolsk at random and asked Anna to read the first passage.
Readers differ on the reach of this faith. Albert Camus reads the novels as the defeat of the novelist by the Christian; Otto Maria Carpeaux sees a convert who never took the step of faith; Joseph Frank and Dostoevsky himself speak of a faith that passed through the strongest negation.
On Clavis: Crime and Punishment.