It was as a 17-year-old boy that I read Dostoyevsky for the first time. Crime and Punishment was the first of his novels I read, and I was hooked. I then read Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot.

I know of many people who love to quote lines from The Brothers Karamazov, but I wonder how many of those people have actually read that novel or Dostoyevsky’s other writings. I am going through Notes form the Underground again over the last couple of days, and I am astonished–yet again–at Dostoyevsky’s prescience. Reading him now, he seems more than ever to have been a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness about what was coming if the world embraced materialism, secularism, and nihilism. It’s almost as if the horrors of the 20th century were written on the pages of Dostoyevsky’s works in the 1800s, but most did not have eyes to see or ears to hear.

Dostoyevsky is not light fare, but nothing enduring is. It takes commitment and diligence to read Karamazov, which runs just less than a 1,000 pages. But the invested hours are more than worth it because we glimpse truths about man’s nature, about God, about good and evil, about the horrors that result from rejecting Christ, from rejecting grace, from determining to go our own ways, and where those ways lead. Exhibit A: Just look at the unfolding suicide of Western civilization where Harvard presidents plagiarize their dissertations, but because the mobs of wokesters and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) minions are running the West’s colleges and universities, she laughs in the face of all who would call out her lies. She continues to get paid, and the kiddos still go to Ethics class, and no one sees there’s a problem. Um, Houston, we do indeed have a problem. Cognitive dissonance is in technicolor, and yet nothing happens.

Dostoyevsky wrote about the psychological derangement that would inevitably follow when truth is rejected, when the Author of truth was rejected, when secularism was imposed upon a people professing themselves wise, but who only demonstrated their folly.

Tolle lege, if you will, dear ones. There is wisdom to be gained in reading and heeding this Russian giant.