Henry Kissinger recently compared Vladimir Putin to “a character out of Dostoevsky,” which apparently delighted the Russian president. That’s not entirely surprising. No Russian writer encapsulates the many incongruous feelings and forces—cultural, spiritual, metaphysical—still coursing through the post-Soviet moment better than Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Technically, our current chapter of Russian history began on Christmas Day, 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Soviet Union dead. But, in reality, it didn’t come into focus until 1999, with the outbreak of the second Chechen war and Putin’s rise to power, and, really, it didn’t acquire any momentum or self-awareness until October 2003, when Yukos oil chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint on a tarmac at an airport in Novosibirsk. That was when Putin signaled that the old Boris Yeltsin configuration—the weakened head of state enveloped by a swarm of self-seeking boyars, or oligarchs—was over and that the once dormant, fractured, fractious state was reasserting its authority and imposing a new order: a new telos. Since then, the question that’s animated all discussion of Russia outside Russia has been: Where is Putin leading his country? What does he want?

When Americans try to explain anything that they think is bad about modern Russia, they inevitably blame the Soviet Union. Russians like flashy clothes because they didn’t have them for so long, they say. Or Russians don’t smile because, well, if you’d grown up in the Soviet Union, you wouldn’t smile either. And so on. This makes us feel good about ourselves—we were on the right side of history—but it’s also incorrect. The great disruption, the sea change, far presaged the rise or fall of the Soviet Union. It was Peter the Great, in the late-17th and early-18th centuries, “cutting a window,” as Pushkin put it, to Europe. That genuflection to the West—reorganizing the army, imposing new styles and codes of conduct on the aristocracy, liberalizing universities—may have been right, but it was also brutal and bloody, and it spawned a crisis of confidence, and a questioning or ambivalence about what Russia ought to be that has existed ever since.

For the next three centuries, this questioning, very roughly, pitted Slavophiles (those who believed in the inherent goodness of the old Russia) against Westernizers, who wanted to transform the empire into Europe: liberal, less insular, more secular. Russia lacked a clearly defined identity, always veering between its oriental and occidental selves—bifurcated, fragmented, unsure of what it was meant to be. In the late 19th century, in the wake of the 1848 revolutions in France and Austria and the German and Italian principalities, and the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the wandering—the battle—sharpened. A radical consciousness opened up. It had been imported from Europe, but, in Russia, as always, it acquired a new ferocity. What had been a desire for polite and incremental reform morphed into a violent nihilism. Change, whatever had been meant by that, would no longer suffice. Now, the only option was to blow it all up and start over.

“A Dostoyevskean vozhd knows Russia is good and the West is not, and has learned that the only way to keep the West out is to overcome it.”

Dostoevsky, who traveled widely in Europe but was suspicious of it, despised passionately the revolutionaries and their desired revolution. He spent the 1860s and 1870s obsessing over Russia’s looming confrontation with itself. His four most important works (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov) are not simply novels, but rather dystopian warnings about what would happen if Russia did not return to its pre-Petrine origins.

Dostoevsky foresaw Russia destroying itself with the clandestine, or not so clandestine, support of the West. The clearest illustration of this self-destruction comes in The Brothers Karamazov. The novel, the longest whodunit ever written, revolves around the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. One of Karamazov’s three legitimate sons, Mitya, is accused and found guilty of the murder. But the real murderer is Karamazov’s mentally challenged, bastard son, Smerdyakov—and the real murderer behind Smerdyakov (the zakashik, or orderer) is Ivan, the most successful and Westernized of the Karamazov brothers. It is Ivan, full of his newfangled Western ideas, who tears apart his family (and, metaphorically, Russia), and it is the last remaining legitimate Karamazov son, Lyosha, who is left to rebuild it. Not incidentally, Lyosha is the youngest, most religious, and most self-effacing of the Karamazov clan. The way forward is actually the way backward—all the way to the ancient, Russian sobornost, the spiritual community that, in the Slavophile mind, used to bind Russia together. This, all these years later, is Putin’s Russia.