Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81). Russian novelist. In 1849, he was arrested for suspected revolutionary activity and condemned to death (or at least was taken to the scaffold and to the last moments before execution before the true sentence of four years in prison and four years as a private in the Siberian army was read out). He was released from the army in 1858. The immediate fruit of this experience was his remarkable House of the Dead (1861). Other novels followed which display a profound understanding of the depths of the human soul. Notes from the Underground (1864) sets rational egoism (which proffers reasons for treating others as instruments) against irrational selfishness which treats others as enemies. Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and The Devils (also translated as The Possessed, 1871) led up to his great achievement, The Brothers Karamazov (completed in 1880). With the Slavophils, Dostoevsky venerated the Orthodox Church, and was deeply impressed by Staretz Amvrosy whom he visited at Optina. But his sense of goodness was neither facile nor naïve. He saw human freedom as something so awesome that most people are ready to relinquish it. This is epitomized in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Solzhenitsyn quoted Dostoevsky, ‘Beauty will save the world.’ But the Church, in contrast, has continued, as Dostoevsky feared to the last that it would, on its path of authority and control.