The article discusses a dispute between the student and the teacher that occurs in the literary works to do with theological education. Basing on episodes from F.M. Dostoevsky, N.S. Leskov and I.S. Nikitin, the author shows the structural proximity of situations prompting the characters’ reactions to complicated theological questions. It is argued that the Russian literature had encountered this kind of situations for the first time. The author links a dispute on religious issues with the ideology of nihilism, on the one hand, and Church teachings, on the other hand.