The Brothers Karamazov

Written in the last two years of the author’s life, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), is the culmination of a politically fraught career spent pursuing a full, unsentimental vision of humanity. Dostoevsky is famous for his work’s distinctive psychological nuance—particularly involving pathological dimensions of self-destruction and misguided sentimental altruism—and has deeply influenced Western schools of theology, existentialism, and literary modernism.

The eponymous brothers are the four sons of the profligate Fyodor Karamazov. As the narrative follows an investigation of the father’s murder, each brother presents a different inflection of humanity—from passionate spiritualism to unyielding skepticism. The Brothers Karamazov is therefore among the “golden age” Russian novels marked by both a consuming interest in philosophical mysteries and a disquiet with the effects of Western modernity on the human imagination. Praised by many as a work of genius and criticized by others as a mouthpiece for Russian Orthodoxy, the novel often tops lists of the greatest novels of all time and is frequently referred to as Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. Dostoevsky published it serially from January 1879 to November 1880, not even four months before his death.

This guide references the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation published in 1990 by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

Plot Summary

After a Prologue remarking on the protagonist’s unconventional heroism, the narrator begins the story: In a fictional Russian town that remains unnamed until near the novel’s end (Skotoprigonyevsk), the Karamazov family is in disarray. The father, Fyodor Karamazov, is a greedy man arguing with his eldest son, Dmitri, over an inheritance. Dmitri is a 28-year-old who served in the military for several years, recklessly squandering money. Fyodor has two (or possibly three) younger sons: Ivan Karamazov, the second oldest and the intellectual, atheist of the brothers; the protagonist Alexei Karamazov, who has the same mother as Ivan and whom the narrator affectionately calls “Alyosha,” is the youngest of the three and the spiritualist; and a fourth, Smerdyakov, Fyodor’s cook and servant and very likely the offspring of Fyodor’s nonmarital relationship with a woman who was homeless and is now passed away.

Dmitri and his father are in a dispute because they have fallen in love with the same woman: Grushenka Svetlov. The rivalry for Grushenka’s love compounds the hostilities between the father and son to the point of violence. However, when Fyodor dies and Dmitri is arrested for his father’s murder, it’s clear that he did not commit the crime.

After visiting his mother Sofia’s grave, Alyosha decides to join a monastery. He states that his desire to join a monastery is based in a desire to escape the darkness of life and find a way toward belief. At the monastery, Alyosha meets a priest, Father Zosima, and this changes his life. Father Zosima plays a key role by influencing Alyosha positively even after Zosima’s death.

The love triangle between Dmitri, Fyodor, and Grushenka is not the only romantic rivalry within the novel: Ivan loves Dmitri’s abandoned fiancée, Katerina Ivanovna. Ivan is the most mysterious of the brothers, but his focal moments in the novel are the famed “Grand Inquisitor” chapter (a poem he wrote that presents arguments against God’s terms of human existence) and a later chapter in which Ivan chats with a hallucination of a devilish figure. Because Ivan was out of town on the day that Fyodor was murdered, he feels his absence left Fyodor vulnerable to attack, and he fears this allowed the murder to happen. Wracked with guilt, he confesses to his father’s murder at the trial, but no one believes him.

Smerdyakov appears to experience seizures: His condition is referred to colloquially as the “falling sickness.” An embittered servant with deep resentments regarding his social status, he confesses to Ivan that he committed the murder, but he says that he was only carrying out Ivan’s secret wish for his father’s death. Smerdyakov hangs himself soon afterward. Refraining from secular notions of guilt and blame, the novel never definitively reveals the murderer, instead leaving this mystery somewhat open-ended and emphasizing how every person plays a role in evil—either through their malicious wishes and thoughts, or their inaction in preventing others’ immoral actions.

Some critics have taken a biographical or psychologistic approach to the novel, based on details from the author’s life. For example, shortly before he began writing The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky lost a son who was named Alexei. Alexei experienced seizures, just like his father, and he died during one of these. In addition, Dostoevsky’s father died when the author was 18, and this might have been one of the inciting events that worsened the author’s own epilepsy. In his famous essay “Parricide and Dostoevsky” (1928), Sigmund Freud draws a connection between Dostoevsky’s guilt over his father’s death, his medical condition, and the events in the novel.

The Brothers Karamazov portrays the influence of religion on culture, and vice versa. It features deep discussions on the social and political issues of the day, with many of the discussions remaining relevant on such topics as the question of free will, the possibility of utopia, and the ethical dimensions of socialism and capitalism. Dostoevsky’s narrative technique allows many ideas, philosophies, and worldviews to interact, mimicking the complexity of the real world; Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin calls this variegated narrative cosmos a polyphony in his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929).