Scrupulous, then, in eschewing didacticism, he sets out as early as page three what is for him one of the most crucial characteristics of Dostoevsky’s ‘position’. Never mind that it is one that any attentive reader, all on his or her own, can discern, and one also consonant with Bakhtin’s influential theory of polyphonic dialogue: the main characters in these novels are essentially in a state of moral transience, of becoming, of being on a road between heaven and hell. Not only have they not yet arrived, it is not at all clear, sometimes even at the end of the book, which of the two options they will choose. How convincing, really, is Raskolnikov’s ‘repentance’, regardless of the comfort it has afforded critics more ‘religious’ than the Archbishop of Canterbury? Williams’s task is to show how faithfully the text enacts their ongoing uncertainty: ‘Instead of imagining a deeply divided authorial mind, half-consciously struggling with contradictory conviction or emotions and betraying this inner division in a confused text, we have a text that consciously writes out the to and fro of the dialogue, always alerting us to the dangers of staying with or believing uncritically what we have just heard.’

If the text is wilfully indeterminate, the individual characters also veer from one pole to another, as Stavrogin does in The Devils (1872) when he virtually ‘tries on’ virtue before discarding it, or they represent a set of alternative positions, as exemplified by the Karamazov family. Raskolnikov commits his murder within the first few chapters of Crime and Punishment (1866), but this is the beginning not of a mere police procedural but rather of a series of debates, philosophical, political and personal, that keep him in a state of moral flux. Stavrogin’s return to his home town, which triggers both the hilarious and the disastrous events in The Devils, is preceded by rumours of his shocking depravity, accompanied by his acts of barbaric insolence, and followed up by interactions with the other characters that are vital to their fates. Yet the scales are not inexorably weighted; the outcomes for several people hang on a hair’s breadth, and we have no idea which way they will go.

Perhaps this state of being always on some uncertain brink is best illustrated by Shatov (the name coming from the verb ‘to waver’), who, when asked by Stavrogin whether he believes in God, claims rather wildly that he believes in Russia, in Orthodoxy, in the Second Coming. ‘But in God?’ persists Stavrogin. ‘I – I shall believe in God,’ whistles Shatov into the empty darkness. He’s not sure, we’re not sure, and certainly Dostoevsky is not going to force an answer either way. Typically, this central theological question is posed by the most amoral character in the novel.

Williams correctly insists that Dostoevsky is not interested in depicting Russian Orthodoxy, or in distinguishing it from other religious systems, but joins with him in taking its centrality for granted. This does not make him a proselytiser any more than an historian of Soviet Russia must be a communist. Orthodoxy plays many dynamic and necessary roles in the novels, one of the most important of which is to act as a counter to the reductii of reason. The Underground Man famously suggests that two and two making more than four might be a very good thing, but unfortunately because of his negativity he is no advertisement for a diverting claim which receives more purchase from Ivan Karamazov’s Devil – the ‘vulgar source of complicated motivation and unreasonableness’, who must be clearly distinguished from the Inquisitor’s super-rational Devil.

‘Part of what Dostoevsky is trying to do,’ says Williams, ‘is to create a fiction that will be closer to the truth God intends than any kind of factual reporting.’ This of course begs the question, but neither the Archbishop nor Dostoevsky can be bothered to reinvent the wheel.

Their interest lies in the inherent ambivalence of the given, the material manifestation of spiritual reality. Actions are interpreted and misinterpreted, utterances understood or misunderstood; half-wits and epileptics display wisdom, prostitutes convey grace. Fluidity, taken if necessary to the point of irrationality, is preferable to rigid self-determination because it ensures the openness and freedom that are the conditions for spiritual understanding – which is not as iconoclastic as it sounds. Mikhail Bulgakov, in his novel The Master and Margarita (1966), which considers the possibilities for creativity in a politically controlled world, uses the interventions of a Devil called Woland to bear out his Faustian epigraph: ‘I am that power which wills forever evil and does forever good.’

Williams’s excursion into Dostoevsky’s concept of immortality – a continuance of ‘meaningful history’ – is equally provocative. Stepan Verkhovensky, who for most of the novel has been a silly old man, says at the end of The Devils, ‘God will not commit an injustice in extinguishing the love for him that has been learned in the course of a human life’. Is Stepan still being silly? His claim would do nothing to persuade a non-believer, yet its ‘truth’ is impeccable: the utter pointlessness of imposing closure on love is an argument for eternal life. Kirillov in The Devils, who loves children and ‘worships’ life, kills himself, persuaded by a ‘rational’ but thoroughly perverse argument: suicide represents the refusal to be limited by rationality. His act, far from being an inspiration to suicide-bombers, is the rational end to an argument that leaves out the transcendent, his fate another reminder of Dostoevsky’s insistence that our beliefs and choices are up to us, whatever the consequences. He makes the point by showing some characters apparently bent on pre-empting free response: Raskolnikov in the blinkered narrowness of his Napoleon-or-louse debate; Stavrogin after he has given up on everything other than detachment.

In these cases, where the individual makes a negative choice, the gain for us lies in the conversations they engage in with others characters of different, but equally unauthorised, points of view. In this polyphonic chorus, not only does Dostoevsky refrain from direct authorial intervention, he does not interfere in the effect of one character’s words upon another. ‘Argument is narrative, and narrative argument,’ as Williams puts it. Raskolnikov, who at the start is wilfully isolated and thus imprisoned in the cage of his own twisted thoughts, eventually begins to make his way out of it through meaningful discussions with his friend Razumikhin, his captor Porfiry, and his would-be saviour Sonya Marmeladov.

Thus dialogue is both intrinsic to the narrative drive and essential to the openness of ‘point of view’ (whosever it may be); but it also, and most importantly in Williams’s schema, invites individuals to take responsibility for each other – not in order to exert control, but to allow for the possibility of an ‘imaginative penetration of what is other’. One way of not doing this is to cling, with Shatov, to a truth ‘outside Christ’, which, according to both Williams and Dostoevsky, would be a world of rigidity and deprivation. Williams is perfectly aware that this perception will not constitute a ‘proof’ for the rationalists amongst his readers; but he is also perfectly convinced that Dostoevsky’s opus is a brilliant and convincing, but never coercive, exploration and illustration of the sublime, irrational truths of God.