Fyodor Dostoevsky is a Christian novelist in a broad sense of the word. Dostoevsky puts Christian themes in an anthropological perspective: belief and unbelief, good and evil, freedom and determinism, guilt and innocence, love and hate are dealt with as fundamental human problems. Besides this, there are explicitly biblical subjects in the novels, such as spiritual rebirth, forgiveness, love for one's neighbour, joy in the creation, the meaning of suffering, evangelical meekness, and the figure of Christ.

Although God, love and crime are perennial concerns of literature, Dostoevsky was the first writer to approach these themes, so uniquely combined, from a Christian anthropological perspective and he is still the most original. He does not present his Christian themes as a postulation or as a religious matter of fact, but in a non-religious context and, within that, in a ‘vulnerable’ way, by the use of contradiction and negation, and by incarnating Christian attitudes in characters with whom the reader cannot directly identify. Dostoevsky's method of work is a paradoxical presentation of Christian themes.

The first paradox is precisely this combination of faith and fiction. By using faith in a fictional context, faith becomes a part of the fiction and remains, in the last instance, literary fantasy. Religious themes are used in gripping psychological detective stories, conflicts about female beauties, or in an atmosphere of terrorist conspiracies. In publicistic essays, letters or a diary one can write far more directly about religious-philosophical matters.