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Article: This season of temptation.(LENT 2007 - meditation on The Brothers Karamazov)
- Article from:
- National Catholic Reporter
- Article date:
- March 2, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 National Catholic Reporter. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky left the abstract liberalism of his earlier Utopian socialism forever behind him when he returned to Russia in 1859 after years of imprisonment and exile in Siberia. There he had come before the reality of God, the dignity of his immortal soul, and the immensely precious but also fearsome gift of freedom. From 1864 on, he developed a tragic, religiously conservative view of human life that anticipated many of the deepest questions of the century that followed. But in The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, which he began in 1878 and finished in 1881, just three months before his death, it is not "his ill-contrived ...