He wrote in his books the two opposite sides of the question: from Ivan, the atheist intellectual's view, and the Elder Zosima's view. The author called the part in which Ivan and Elder Zosima each speak their beliefs as "the culminating point of the novel" ("Letters", 7567, 859). Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook about "The Grand Inquisitor": "Those blockheads have never even conceived (thought of) so powerful a rejection of God as exists (is) in the Inquisitor and the preceding chapter (the chapter before it), to which the whole book will serve as answer... Throughout Europe there has not been and does not exist so powerful an expression from the aesthetic point of view as mine."