The Grand Inquisitor

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By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald
(1994)

Endlessly thought-provoking, “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” is the world’s greatest novelist’s answer to humanity’s greatest riddle—its own existence.

Is there a solution to the everlasting craving of humanity? Is faith in God worth its price? Why is freedom so easy to assert but so unbearable to sustain? Why do human beings so openly prefer to be fed than to be free? Why do institutions so often become the enemies of their original mission? Why do our responses to three words, “miracle, mystery, and authority,” sum up “the whole future history of the world and of humanity”?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” a prose poem from The Brothers Karamazov, poses these ageless dilemmas with a shocking frankness and a passionate intensity. Dostoyevsky provides no easy answers, but his powerful tale is a searching examination for all for whom “the unexamined life is not worth ­living.”­

“When I came to read Dostoyevsky’s great masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, I realized that he was not just a writer with a superb gift for storytelling, but that he had a special insight into what life is about, into man’s relationship with his Creator, making him a prophetic voice looking into and illuminating the future.”
Malcolm Muggeridge

Category: Readings (No. 9)

What you have to do to be a success must be addressed only after you have found a reason to be successful.

Neil Postman

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