Dostoevsky is hailed as a great Christian writer and a profound, innovatory depictor of the modern human condition. Precisely this combination raises intriguing problems for interpretation. In notes written towards the end of his life, Bakhtin observed:

This, paradoxically, is both true and untrue for Dostoevsky. He was a master of irony, of the word spoken with reservations, but his works are hardly ‘completely secularised’. The Christian worldview permeates and shapes all Dostoevsky's post-Siberian works, from the large narrative structures of his redemptive plots, whether failed, realised or suspended, to single words charged with Christian significance. By ‘the biblical word’ is meant any saying, image, symbol or thought whose source can be traced to the Bible. It is by his use of this word, with its distinctive content, stylistics and emotional tonalities, that Dostoevsky belongs to Christian art.