It is Dostoevsky's genius as a writer to have been able to feel (and to express) both these extremes of rejection and acceptance. This seed was one day to flower into the magnificent growth of Ivan Karamazov's passionate protest against God's injustice and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, but it also grew into Alyosha's submission to the awesomeness of the infinite before which Job too had once bowed his head, and into Zosima's teaching of the necessity for an ultimate faith in the goodness of God's mysterious wisdom. "It's a strange thing, Anya, this books is one of the first in my life which made an impression on me I was then still almost a child." There is an allusion to this revelatory experience of the young boy in The Brothers Karamazov, where Zosima recalls being struck by a reading of the book of Job at the age of eight and feeling that "for the first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God's word in my heart" (9:287). “Years later, when Dostoevsky was reading the book of Job once again, he wrote his wife that it put him into such a state of "unhealthy rapture" that he almost cried.
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