The Brothers Karamazov

About this book

The Brothers Karamazov is the last novel of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, serialized in 1879 and 1880 and published in book form shortly before he died in early 1881. It is set in a provincial Russian town and concerns a dissolute landowner, Fyodor Karamazov, and his three sons: Dmitri, a passionate ex-officer; Ivan, a cold intellectual; and Alyosha, a novice monk. A fourth young man, the servant Smerdyakov, may also be the old man’s son.

Dostoyevsky intended it as the first part of a larger work centered on Alyosha and did not live to write the rest. What exists is complete in itself and has been treated since as one of the central works of European fiction. Philosophers, theologians and novelists have all claimed it, and the chapter known as “The Grand Inquisitor” is read and taught on its own.

The story

The novel opens with the family history and brings the brothers together in their hometown for the first time in years. Dmitri is in a violent dispute with his father over money he believes he is owed and over a young woman, Grushenka, whom both men are pursuing. The brothers’ attempt to settle the matter at the local monastery, before Alyosha’s spiritual guide Father Zosima, collapses into farce and the father’s drunken provocations.

The quarrel over Grushenka and the inheritance builds through the first half of the book. In the second half, old Karamazov is found murdered, and a son is arrested. The remaining books follow the investigation, the preliminary hearing and a full trial, while the question of who is guilty, and in what sense, spreads out to involve all four brothers.

Themes and historical context

Dostoyevsky wrote the novel in the last years of a life that had included a death sentence commuted at the scaffold, four years in a Siberian prison camp, epilepsy, gambling debts and the death of a young son, Alyosha, in 1878. He was by then a famous and politically conservative figure, a defender of Orthodoxy and of Russian distinctiveness against the liberal and socialist ideas of his youth. The book is his fullest statement of those convictions, and also the fullest statement of the case against them.

That double quality is why the novel is read across the lines of belief. Ivan’s rebellion against a God who permits the suffering of children, and his prose poem about Christ returning to Seville during the Inquisition, are among the strongest arguments against religious faith in any literature, and they are written by a believer. Zosima’s teachings in the following book are the intended answer, and readers have disagreed since 1880 about whether the answer holds.

Around the theological argument is a detailed picture of Russian provincial life in the 1860s: monks, officers, schoolboys, a new kind of ambitious lawyer, peasants, and the clash of old religious culture with imported European ideas. The trial scenes draw on Dostoyevsky’s close following of real court cases after the 1864 legal reforms.

Who should read it

This is a long, demanding and sometimes chaotic book. The narrator is garrulous, the characters speak at length and in extremes, and the philosophical set pieces stop the plot for dozens of pages at a time. Readers who approach it as a murder story with digressions, or as a philosophical dialogue with a murder attached, will both be rewarded; those expecting a tidy novel will not. Garnett’s translation is readable and was the one most of the twentieth century’s readers used. Allow several weeks, and expect to think about Ivan for some time afterward.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg text is the translation by Constance Garnett (1861-1946), first published in 1912. No transcriber credits are recorded in the catalog entry.