Fyodor’s sons, the titular brothers, occasionally teeter on the brink of madness and spiritual ruin, each exhibiting contempt for petty-bourgeois morality. On this slim narrative foundation rests an enormous, unwieldy superstructure of social commentary, religious meditation, and philosophical rumination.

Enormously complex and running to nearly one thousand pages in some editions, the novel revolves around the murder of the landowner Fyodor Karamazov and the whole action-packed into a mere four days-provides the highly wrought drama of the finest of detective stories. The Brothers Karamazov is not only a meditation on grace and sinfulness, hell and salvation. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, by Giotto di Bondone, c. Perhaps the devil understands more about God in his own fashion than the stuff-shirted prig. Perhaps dissoluteness is merely a crooked way to heaven. Yet his imagination was haunted by rebels and parricides, by the damned and debauched, as much as by the saints and scripture.

As one who felt the lure of Russian Orthodox Christianity, Dostoevsky set his face firmly against radical politics and liberal secularism like many a modernist, he was as politically conservative as he was artistically audacious. His extraordinary novels, among them Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and Demons (1872), present a society that is sunk in feudal poverty but gripped by avant-garde ideas, awash with anarchism and nihilism, God-fearers and God-deniers. His characters seem to occupy a permanent state of pathological anguish or morbid sensitivity: ruined gentlefolk, buffoonish landowners, and socially paranoid clerks reap a perverse delight from being insulted or humiliated. Like much of Dostoevsky’s fiction, his final novel combines the tragic with the grotesque, moments of mystical ecstasy with episodes of savage farce. Sigmund Freud believed that the book betrayed darkly enigmatic, even criminal tendencies in Dostoevsky, while a Russian neologism- Karamazovshchina-came to denote the depravity, violence, and psychological deviation which the work explores.

First published in tsarist Russia in 1880, The Brothers Karamazov is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s metaphysical masterpiece, a novel alive with rumors of damnation and intimations of immortality.

The inquisitor dostoevsky