Some readers will regard the statement that Dostoevsky was a Christian novelist, as a simple statement of an obvious truth, while others may regard it as a denial of all that is modern and of enduring importance in his work. It is easy to see why. However, both camps will agree on one thing. Dostoevsky and his novels take the claims of religion seriously on its own terms. Religion does not occupy the peripheral place that it does in most notable English novels of the period: it is not just depicted from the outside as a social phenomenon nor, with some minor exceptions, is it the subject of caricature. In both Dostoevsky's life and work, Christianity was engaged in pitched battle with the most desolate atheism, and neither is of that untroubled, optimistic variety often held to be characteristic of the Victorian age. When, awaiting his own execution on the Semenovskii Square in 1849, he had murmured the words ‘Nous serons avec le Christ’, his companion, the atheist Speshnev, had rejoined dryly, ‘un peu de poussière.’58 Whatever thoughts on life and death had passed through Dostoevsky's mind before this moment, the burden of Speshnev's words, in one form or another, refused thereafter to go away. In a letter to A N Maikov of 25 March/6 April 1870 about his plan for The Life of a Great Sinner he wrote, ‘The main question, which runs through all the parts, is the one that has tormented me consciously and unconsciously all my life, the existence of God’ (XXIX, I, 117).