On November 11, 2021, the Chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, who was at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York with the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’ and at the invitation of His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon of All America and Canada, served a litiya for F.M. Dostoevsky on the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birth in the seminary chapel dedicated to the Three Holy Hierarchs.
Praying at the service were Archbishop Melchisedek of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, the seminary president Archpriest Chad Hatfield, seminary faculty and students, and participants of the “Search the Scriptures” conference who had come from different parts of America.
In his address after the service, Metropolitan Hilarion reminded those present of the circumstances of F.M. Dostoevsky’s life, of his youthful enthusiasm for socialist ideas, which led him to the scaffold and penal servitude, and of the influence the Gospel — the only book allowed in prison — had on him. The DECR chairman noted the special significance of Dostoevsky’s work not only for Russia but for the whole world, since his works have been translated into every language that has a written form.
“For his contemporaries Dostoevsky was a prophet who foretold many of the calamities that later befell Russia. For future generations he turned out to be not only a prophet but also an apostle, because through his works many come to Christ and discover the Gospel. It is through his works that many people around the world learn about Russia, about Orthodoxy, about the ‘radiant image’ of Christ, which was a constant source of inspiration for the writer,” the hierarch emphasized.