At his trial he expresses no remorse or guilt for his crime. He is condemned to penal servitude in Siberia for eight years. Sonya follows him to Siberia and lives in a town near his prison. She lives only for him and does not bother him with thoughts about religion. Raskolnikov himself asks her after a year to lend him her copy of the New Testament. “It was the one from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him.” But he does not take it up and start reading it right away. Its influence may be in his future but only his imprisonment is now sure and Sonya haunting him and waiting for him nearby with nothing to sustain her except her secret treasure.
A main character in Dostoevsky’s last novel, TheBrothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov, says that if there is no God then we are free to do anything. The European existentialist philosophers took up this idea and held that all human acts must result from free choices since in a godless universe human being has no foundation. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre went so far as to say that man is “condemned to be free”. Dostoevsky held that freedom must be the supreme human value, but instead of denying the existence of God in order to act freely like some existentialists, he reasoned that finding God is possible if we reach a state of spiritual and intellectual freedom. The groundless freedom Dostoevsky felt in himself inspired him to create any kind of character ready to think or to do anything at all. Logical thought and free will result in human choices that create a world where human behavior is forced to follow a premeditated pattern dictated by reason. The more man accepts to live a life ruled by his reason and a knowledge arrived at using the same logic used by scientists, the less able he is to discover the world within him of God’s divine grace which has nothing to do with reason and knowledge. God can control everything but he will not. He will not interfere with man’s freedom to do and think whatever he wants. For Dostoevsky grace is a divine gift, a secret treasure, but total freedom is also a divine gift, perhaps a more important one. God gives humans his divine grace freely but he can not give it or he will not give it to people who live enslaved by a rationalized intentional way of living. Dostoevsky’s rootless creations are enslaved by a power that does not originate in God.