Overview
The three Karamazov brothers grapple with faith, free will, and morality after their father's murder, in what many consider the greatest novel ever written.
Dostoevsky published The Brothers Karamazov in serial form in 1879-80 and died three months after completing it. The novel is an inquiry into the existence of God, the nature of freedom, and the moral weight of paternal crime, told through the story of three brothers and their dissolute father. It is Dostoevsky's last and longest novel, and most critics regard it as his greatest.
Key Ideas
Faith Versus Doubt
Dostoevsky presents the most powerful case both for and against the existence of God.
Moral Responsibility
We are all responsible for one another.
Love as the Foundation
Active, selfless love is the only true answer to despair.
Who should read this
Readers prepared for an 800-page philosophical novel that also functions as a murder mystery, a family tragedy, and a theological argument. Karamazov rewards patient reading; the chapters famous on their own (the Grand Inquisitor, the trial) are more powerful in context. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation is the modern standard.
Who might skip it
Skip if you are not ready for sustained engagement with religious argument — Dostoevsky takes the question of God's existence seriously enough to give his atheist character the strongest arguments. Skip also if you dislike the melodrama endemic to nineteenth-century Russian fiction; Dostoevsky is sometimes unreasonable about his own plot.
The verdict
One of the five greatest novels ever written. Dostoevsky is flawed as a prose stylist and his plotting is erratic, but no other novelist has gone deeper into what it feels like to believe or not believe, to love or fail to love, to be free or pretend to be. The Grand Inquisitor chapter alone is a book's worth of argument. Read slowly.
"The soul is healed by being with children."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
If you liked this
Crime and Punishment as the shorter Dostoevsky. The Idiot for his second-greatest novel.