The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Summary
Fyodor Karamazov, a dissolute landowner despised by nearly everyone around him, is murdered, and suspicion falls hardest on his passionate, impulsive eldest son Dmitri, who has spent the book locked in an open rivalry with his own father over money and over the same woman, Grushenka. Dmitri's brothers pull the family in opposite directions: Ivan, an intellectual wrestling with whether a just God can permit a world of suffering, articulates his doubts in the long embedded parable of the Grand Inquisitor, while the youngest, Alyosha, a novice at a nearby monastery, tries to hold the family together with a faith the other two cannot share. Smerdyakov, Fyodor's embittered illegitimate servant, actually commits the murder, and confesses it privately to Ivan before hanging himself, leaving Ivan wracked with a guilt no one else believes he deserves. Dmitri is tried, convicted on largely circumstantial evidence, and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in Siberia despite his innocence of the killing itself, and the novel closes with plans quietly forming for his escape to America rather than a submission to the sentence.
Dostoevsky builds the murder plot into a far larger argument about God, freedom, and moral responsibility, and the Grand Inquisitor chapter in particular, in which a cardinal has the returned Christ arrested for interfering with the church's control over human freedom, has become one of the most discussed passages in modern literature on its own. The book is dense and philosophically demanding by design, narrated by a self declared local chronicler whose voice keeps blurring into his characters' own thoughts, and it asks patience above all from a reader more interested in incident than in argument.
Dostoevsky drew the novel's setting partly from his own grief over the death of his three year old son, also named Alyosha, from epilepsy in 1878.
Historical Context & Significance
The Brothers Karamazov ran serially in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880 and appeared as a complete novel that same year; Dostoevsky died less than four months after finishing it. Reactions among his contemporaries varied sharply: Tchaikovsky called him a writer of genius but an antipathetic one, while Tolstoy, on his own deathbed years later, asked to have the book brought to him.
Its later influence has been extraordinary. Sigmund Freud called it the most magnificent novel ever written, and Albert Einstein reportedly named it the supreme summit of all literature. Ludwig Wittgenstein carried a copy to the front during the First World War, and William Faulkner cited it as his greatest literary inspiration alongside Shakespeare and the Bible. A 2009 Russian television serial is generally considered the adaptation closest to the novel itself.