A spiritual craving

"Russian atheists and Russian Jesuits are the outcome not only of vanity, not only of a bad, vain feeling, but also of spiritual agony, spiritual thirst, a craving for something higher, for a firm footing, for a fatherland in which they have ceased to believe, because they have never even known it! It's easier for a Russian to become an atheist than for anyone else in the world. And Russians do not merely become atheists, but they invariable believe in atheism, as though it were a new religion without noticing they are putting their faith in a negation. So great is our craving!" - Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Darkness of the Soul

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. There is something else here, and there will always be something else - something that the atheists will forever slur over; they will always be talking of something else.

Part 2, Chapter 5
Oh, in those six months he (Prince Myshkin) had passed through a great deal - a great deal that had been quite new to him, unguessed, unknown, and unexpected!
But the soul of another is a dark place [...] for many it is a dark place.

Compassion was the chief and perhaps only law of all human existence. Ah, how impardonably and dishonorably he had wronged Rogozkin! No, it was not that "the Russian soul was a dark place," but that in his own there was darkness, since he could imagine such horrors!