Dostoevsky’s suffering, faith, and doubt (soon after release from Siberian prison):
I have often heard, N.D., that you are very religious. But it is not because you are religious but because I have experienced and felt it for myself that I say to you that in such moments one thirsts like ‘parched grass’ for faith, and finds it precisely because the truth shines in misfortune. About myself I must tell you that I am a child of the age, a child of unbelief and doubt, to this day and even (I know) to the edge of the grave. What terrible torments the thirst to believe has cost me and still costs me, becoming all the greater in my soul for the arguments against it in my mind! And yet sometimes God sends me moments of complete tranquility; in those moments I love, and know that others love me, and in such moments I have constructed within myself a symbol of faith, everything in which is clear and sacred to me. This symbol is very simple; here it is: believe that there is nothing more beautiful, profounder, more sympathetic, wiser, braver, or more perfect than Christ; and not only is there nothing, but, as I tell myself with jealous love, there could not be anything. Even more: if somebody proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if it were a fact that the truth excludes Christ, I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.
~Dostoevsky, from Dostoevsky: A Self-Portrait by Jessie Coulson
