The Brothers Karamazov
The Brothers Karamazov
Three brothers, one dead father, and every question about God that humanity has ever been afraid to ask.
God and the Karamazovs
Fyodor Dostoevsky's final 1880 masterpiece follows the Karamazov family as their patriarch is murdered and suspicion falls on his three sons. Dmitri is passionate and reckless. Ivan is a cold rationalist wrestling with the problem of evil. Alyosha is a gentle novice monk trying to hold love in a world that resists it. The murder is a frame for the most serious philosophical conversations in the history of the novel.
Reading The Brothers Karamazov
Depth
/
Book
"Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
"Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky completed the novel in 1880, just four months before his death. He had planned a sequel following Alyosha's life but did not live to write it. The epilepsy he suffered informed Ivan's hallucinations.
Sigmund Freud called it the greatest novel ever written. It influenced Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and virtually every major twentieth-century novelist who engaged seriously with questions of morality and existence.