I did not accept the Christian aspect of it then. I couldn’t. It was too alien to my upbringing, too at odds with the mental atmosphere in which I lived. I told myself that Dostoevsky was merely using Christ as a symbol for the reality of moral truth. But never mind. I knew beyond a doubt that the essential vision of the novel was valid. The story’s rightness struck me broadside so that the journey of my heart changed direction. From the moment I read Crime and Punishment—though I did not know it, though it took me decades, though I was lost on
