Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky's greatest fiction captures his own spiritual quandary, first as a liberal and revolutionary of the 1840s and then as a Christian apologist in the 1860s and 1870s. His novels juxtapose modish, rational blueprints for the betterment of society to the simple faith of the Russian people. By the late 1860s, Dostoevsky was arguing vehemently that the narod, however sinful and ignorant, had managed to preserve the image of Christ and that the upper classes, corrupted by western ideas, needed to learn from them. Two decades earlier he had placed his hopes for social change in the westward-looking intelligentsia and had rejected the notion that Russianness was to be found in pre-Petrine antiquities or among the superstitions of village folk. Between lay the central episodes in the formation of the mature writer – arrest, Siberian imprisonment, and exile.

This chapter will chart Dostoevsky's thinking about the Russian people and folklore prior to the writing of Crime and Punishment in the mid 1860s. Its first section will treat his childhood acquaintance with the narod and its traditions, the probable murder of his father at the hands of his serfs, and his ideas about the people in the 1840s. Dostoevsky's closest contact with the Russian people occurred between 1850 and 1854 when he was squeezed into filthy, putrid quarters side by side with common criminals in the Omsk Stockade.