Culture

The Book Under Dostoevsky's Pillow: How a New Testament Given in Siberia Shaped His Great Novels

Minutes from a firing squad, Fyodor Dostoevsky was spared by a staged pardon and sent to a Siberian prison camp. On the way, a woman handed him a New Testament. He kept it for the rest of his life, and you can find its fingerprints on every great novel he wrote.

YESHVA EditorialOctober 12, 20266 min readEditor: Luciano Olguin

Image: Vasily Perov · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Join free to read 3 articles a month

Create a free Yeshva account — it takes a minute.

Join free Sign in

More like this

Culture6 min read

Fanny Crosby and the Eight Thousand Hymns She Never Saw

Blind from six weeks old, Fanny Crosby wrote some eight thousand hymns, often for a dollar or two and often under a pen name. Her story is less about suffering than about a grandmother, a memorized Bible and steady, unglamorous work.

Culture6 min read

Be Thou My Vision: An Irish Prayer Older Than Its Tune

The hymn many people sing at weddings and funerals began as a medieval Irish prayer for protection, passed through a scholar's plain prose and a poet's verse, and only found its famous tune in 1919. Its path from a monastery to a modern hymnal is a story of patient translators.

Culture7 min read

The "New City" Outside Caesarea: How a Famine and a Bishop Gave the World the Hospital

In the fourth century, a bishop named Basil answered a famine with a soup kitchen, then built something no one had seen before: free beds, doctors and care for anyone who needed them, including people with leprosy whom everyone else had cast out.

Culture7 min read

Bach's Bible: The Pencil Notes That Show Why He Signed Every Score to God's Glory

A pastor visiting his cousin in a Michigan farmhouse in 1934 noticed a signature on the title page of an old German Bible. It was Johann Sebastian Bach's, and the notes in its margins say what he thought music was for.

Culture7 min read

The Abbot Who Wanted More Light: How Suger of Saint-Denis Gave Us the Gothic Cathedral

In 1144, a small, tireless abbot near Paris dedicated a church choir unlike anything Europe had seen, with walls that seemed made of colored light. Why Suger built it that way says as much about theology as about engineering.

Culture6 min read

The Slave Ship Captain Behind "Amazing Grace" and the Conversion That Took Forty Years

John Newton found God in a storm in 1748, then went on captaining slave ships. The true story behind the world's most-sung hymn is slower and more honest than the legend, and it says a great deal about how grace actually changes a person.

Culture7 min read

A Mighty Fortress: The Hymn Luther Wrote for Frightened People

Martin Luther wrote it in the years of plague, threats and his own dark moods, and it was in print by 1529. The story of "A Mighty Fortress" is less about a defiant reformer than about a man who needed a song to stand on.