The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov is a novel by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, serialized between 1879 and 1880 and published in a single edition shortly before his death. Set in nineteenth-century Russia, it follows the dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three legitimate sons, the passionate former officer Dmitri, the intellectual atheist Ivan and the gentle novice monk Alyosha, alongside Fyodor's illegitimate son and servant Smerdyakov, whose resentments converge when Fyodor is murdered. Dmitri, locked in bitter rivalry with his father over money and over the courtesan Grushenka, becomes the prime suspect and is convicted at trial, though the novel makes clear that the actual killer is Smerdyakov, acting on ideas about the permissibility of murder that he has absorbed from Ivan's nihilistic philosophy. Dostoevsky used the brothers' contrasting temperaments, and the counsel of the monastic elder Father Zosima, to stage an extended argument over faith, doubt, free will and moral responsibility, most famously in Ivan's parable of the Grand Inquisitor. Widely regarded as one of the supreme achievements of world literature, The Brothers Karamazov is considered the culmination of Dostoevsky's work and remains one of the most influential novels ever written on the problem of religious belief in the face of human suffering.