“Go and tell," I whispered to him. There was little voice left in me, but I whispered it firmly. Then I took the Gospel from the table, the Russian translation, and showed him John, chapter 12, verse 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." I had read this verse just before he came. He read it. "True," he said, and smiled bitterly. "Yes, in these books," he said, after a pause, one finds all sorts of terrible things. It is easy to shove them under someone's nose. Who wrote them, were they human beings?" "The Holy Spirit wrote them," I said. "Its easy for you to babble," he smiled again, but this time almost hatefully. I again took the book, opened it to a different place, and showed him the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 31. He read: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." He read it and threw the book aside. He even began trembling all over. "A fearful verse," he said. "You picked a good one, I must say.”
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.