In this concluding essay I make no claim to originality. As I did in essay two, I shall selectively revisit earlier work by other scholars, but this time not to raise questions so much as to show how these scattered findings may be integrated into the model that I have suggested.

The chapter on The Brothers Karamazov shows that it is perfectly possible to read Dostoevsky convincingly through the prism of the Epstein model, once this model has been translated into synchronic terms and modified to take account of the fact that the Soviet experience had not yet occurred. In fact, this rather significant modification is less damaging than it might seem at first sight, since it explains why Dostoevsky is often said to have anticipated, or even prophesied, Soviet Russia and other atheistic totalitarian states of the twentieth century. The novel gives clear hints of that originary silence of darkness that may lead to the fullness and tranquillity of faith on the one hand or the desolation of the abyss of nothingness on the other; it puts the conflict between these two outcomes at centre stage in the persons and philosophies of life of Ivan and Zosima, and to varying degrees in those of their acolytes. It also presents us with evidence that the two responses are not necessarily polar opposites, but may interact and overlap, and that any individual may flip uneasily between the two.