The Brothers Karamazov
- Written By Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
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The Brothers Karamazov
In a provincial Russian town, the vicious and grasping Fyodor Karamazov presides over a family torn apart by greed, jealousy, and long-buried resentment. His three sons could hardly be more different: Dmitri, the reckless army officer locked in a bitter rivalry with his own father over money and a beautiful woman. Ivan, the brilliant skeptic whose reasoning corrodes every certain belief it meets. And Alyosha, the gentle young novice who seeks through faith an answer to his family’s torment. All while a fourth young man slithers through the household as well—the servant Smerdyakov, watchful and quietly poisonous.
When the patriarch is found murdered, suspicion falls on Dmitri, and the town is convulsed by a trial that lays every Karamazov soul bare. Beneath the mystery runs the question that consumed Dostoevsky to the end of his days: whether, in a world that may hold no God, anything at all can truly be forbidden.
Completed just months before the author’s death in 1881, The Brothers Karamazov is widely regarded as his crowning achievement and one of the supreme novels in all of literature. Its deep meditations on faith, doubt, and moral responsibility (above all the celebrated parable of the Grand Inquisitor) have shaped philosophers, theologians, and novelists ever since, drawing the admiration of minds from Freud and Einstein to Kafka and Faulkner.
More than a century on, it endures as a book readers return to across their lifetime, finding in its pages an ever-deepening reckoning with the largest questions a person can ask.
In this latest reprint, it’s time to revisit one of the greatest novels ever written.
About the Author
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821 as the son of a doctor at a hospital for the city’s poor. He trained as a military engineer in St. Petersburg but soon abandoned that career for literature, winning early acclaim via his first novel, Poor Folk, in 1846.
In 1849 his life took an abrupt turn. Arrested for belonging to a circle of young intellectuals who met to discuss banned political ideas, he was sentenced to death and led out before a firing squad, only to be reprieved at the last moment in a staged mock execution. His sentence had already been commuted to years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp, followed by military service in exile. The ordeal marked him permanently and deepened the religious faith and psychological insight that fill his mature work.
Freed at last, and plagued for the rest of his life by epilepsy, gambling debts, and personal loss, Dostoevsky produced the novels that secured his place among the giants of world literature: Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1871-72), and finally The Brothers Karamazov (1880), completed only months before he died. He passed away in St. Petersburg in 1881, mourned by between 50,000 and 100,000 people, and is remembered today as one of the most profound explorers of the human soul ever produced by humanity.
