The Brothers Karamazov

• 1. Introduction

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  The Brothers Karamazov is the sixteenth and final novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and he died less than four months after it finished publication in November 1880. Those four months are worth sitting with. A man spends nearly two years pouring everything he knows about God, guilt, family, and Russia into a single book, sees it published, and then is gone. What he left behind has been called one of the supreme achievements in world literature. But how did it get made? What drove a 19th-century Russian novelist to plant the questions of faith and free will inside a murder mystery about a father and three sons? And why, more than a century later, does it still shake people who read it to their core? Albert Einstein called it the supreme summit of all literature. Sigmund Freud called it the most magnificent novel ever written. Pope Benedict XVI cited it in a papal encyclical. Those are strange traveling companions, and the novel that united them is stranger still.

• 2. A Novel Built From Grief

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  In May 1878, Dostoevsky's three-year-old son Alyosha died of epilepsy, a condition the boy had inherited from his father. The novelist's grief ran so deep that it altered the very architecture of the book he was writing. He named the hero of the novel Alyosha and gave him the qualities he most admired and sought in a human being. The loss of his son also shapes a minor but devastating subplot: a father named Captain Snegiryov and his dying boy Ilyusha, whose humiliation and decline mirror the private anguish Dostoevsky could not otherwise speak aloud.

  The death of his son brought Dostoevsky to the Optina Monastery, where he found a different kind of material. The biography of the Elder Zosima, one of the novel's most spiritually central figures, draws on a text Dostoevsky discovered at Optina called 'The Life of the Elder Leonid'. The character of Zosima himself was modeled partly on Father Ambrose, a real monk Dostoevsky met during that visit in 1878.

  The novel's roots reach back even further. Dostoevsky began his first notes in April 1878, but elements were drawn from an unfinished project he had started in 1869 titled The Life of a Great Sinner. Another predecessor, a short piece called Drama in Tobolsk, dated the 13th of September 1874, is considered the first draft of the novel's opening chapter. It tells of a fictional murder in Staraya Russa committed by a soldier named Dmitry Ilynskov, who is suspected of killing his father for his inheritance. The father's body is found in a pit beneath a house. That image never quite left Dostoevsky.

• 3. The Karamazov Family

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  Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is 55 years old when the novel opens: a sensualist, a compulsive liar, and a father who showed no interest in any of his children at birth. His three legitimate sons were raised apart from each other and from him. That cold origin drives almost everything that follows.

  The eldest, Dmitri, is 28 and described as a sensualist in the mold of his father. He was engaged to a woman named Katerina Ivanovna before abandoning that attachment after falling in love with a fiery 22-year-old named Grushenka. His dispute with his father centers on two things at once: the inheritance he believes is being withheld, and the same woman. He calls his youngest brother Alyosha his 'cherub'. The character of Dmitri was initially drawn from a convict Dostoevsky met while imprisoned in Siberia, a man named D. I. Ilyinsky, who was serving time for his father's murder while always maintaining his innocence. He was eventually freed after another man confessed.

  Ivan, the 24-year-old middle son, is intellectually brilliant and inwardly tortured. His dictum that 'if there is no God, everything is lawful' runs like a current through the entire novel, eventually finding its most destructive expression in the novel's fifth figure: Smerdyakov. The probable illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovich, Smerdyakov was born to a mute woman who died alone in childbirth in Fyodor's own bathhouse. His name translates as 'son of the reeking one'. He was raised by a servant named Grigory, who once struck him violently across the face; a week later, Smerdyakov had his first epileptic seizure. From childhood, he shared none of Grigory's faith, and as an adult he adopted Ivan's atheism entirely, carrying it further than Ivan ever intended.

  Alyosha, the 20-year-old youngest brother, is identified by the narrator in the very first chapter as the novel's hero. At the novel's opening he is a novice at the local Russian Orthodox monastery, devoted to the Elder Zosima. His faith stands in direct contrast to Ivan's atheism, and his presence functions as a kind of living counterargument to his brother's despair.

• 4. Ivan's Grand Argument

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  Book V of the novel is titled 'Pro and Contra', and it contains what may be the most discussed passage in modern literature. In the chapter 'Rebellion', Ivan sits with Alyosha at a restaurant and explains why he refuses to accept the world God has made. His argument is not that God does not exist. It is more unsettling than that. Ivan argues that a world built on the suffering of children cannot be accepted by a heart that loves, and so he chooses to 'humbly return the ticket' to God. Dostoevsky told his editor that his intent in this section was to portray 'the seed of the idea of destruction in our time in Russia among the young people uprooted from reality'.

  Ivan then narrates what he calls a poem, 'The Grand Inquisitor'. In his imagined story, Jesus returns to earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is immediately arrested. The Grand Inquisitor visits him in prison at night and delivers a long, fierce accusation: 'Thou hast come to hinder us.' The Inquisitor accuses Jesus of having inflicted the burden of free will on humanity, a burden most people cannot bear. He claims that the Church has corrected this error, accepting the Devil's temptations that Christ refused, including earthly kingdoms and material bread. 'We shall triumph and shall be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man,' the Inquisitor declares. At the end of the monologue, Jesus says nothing. He steps forward and kisses the old man on the lips. Stunned, the Inquisitor releases him and tells him never to return.

  Alyosha's response to Ivan is immediate and physical: he kisses his brother softly on the lips, the same gesture. Ivan shouts with delight. Philosopher Charles B. Guignon notes that by the middle of the twentieth century, Ivan Karamazov had become the icon of existentialist rebellion in the writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus centered his 1951 book Rebel on a direct discussion of Ivan's revolt.

• 5. Murder, Trial, and Verdict

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  Fyodor Pavlovich is found murdered. The three thousand rubles he had set aside for Grushenka have vanished. Every piece of evidence points toward Dmitri: he had threatened to kill his father, he had been seen running from the property covered in blood, and he had been destitute earlier that evening yet suddenly appeared with a large sum of money. The only other person in the house that night, Smerdyakov, had been incapacitated by an epileptic seizure.

  Dmitri explains the money. Katerina Ivanovna had given him three thousand rubles to send to her sister. He spent half of that at an earlier drunken party with Grushenka, then sewed the remainder inside his clothing, intending to return it. The investigators are not convinced. He is formally charged and taken to prison.

  The truth emerges only to Ivan. In three private meetings with Smerdyakov in Book XI, Ivan gradually learns that Smerdyakov had faked the epileptic fit, committed the murder, and taken the money. Smerdyakov tells Ivan he was complicit: Ivan had told him when he would be leaving the house, and more importantly had instilled in him the conviction that in a godless world, everything is permitted. In their final meeting, Smerdyakov hands Ivan the stolen money and then hangs himself.

  At trial, the turning point is Katerina's testimony. Shocked by Ivan's public breakdown on the stand, she abandons her defense of Dmitri and produces a letter he had written while drunk, threatening to kill his father. Dmitri is found guilty. The verdict arrives despite the real killer being dead. His sentence is twenty years of hard labor in Siberia.

• 6. The Novel's Afterlife

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  Sigmund Freud published a paper in 1928 titled 'Dostoevsky and Parricide', arguing that Dostoevsky's epilepsy was not a natural condition but a physical manifestation of hidden guilt over his own father's death. Freud cited the fact that Dostoevsky's epileptic fits began at age 18, the year his father died.

  Franz Kafka called himself and Dostoevsky 'blood relatives', and was drawn specifically to the hatred the Karamazov brothers direct at their father. He is thought to have drawn on that theme in his short story 'The Judgment'. Ludwig Wittgenstein read the novel so often that he knew whole passages by heart; during World War I, a copy was one of the few possessions he brought to the front.

  Martin Heidegger identified Dostoevsky's thought as one of the most important sources for Being and Time. Of the two portraits Heidegger kept in his office, one was of Dostoevsky. Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner reread The Brothers Karamazov regularly, calling it his greatest literary inspiration after Shakespeare and the Bible. He wrote that American literature had yet to produce anything great enough to compare with it.

  Not every reader was won over. Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, D. H. Lawrence, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky all expressed reservations. Tchaikovsky wrote in a letter that Dostoevsky was 'a writer of genius, but an antipathetic one'. Tolstoy, who admired Dostoevsky's heart while questioning his artistic accomplishment, still requested The Brothers Karamazov on his deathbed. Joseph Stalin, who had read Dostoevsky since his youth, left behind a copy of the novel with extensive highlights and marginal notes that researchers have since studied closely. The plan Dostoevsky never lived to execute would have sent Alyosha, the novel's hero, down a path that ended with the assassination of the Russian Tsar.

• 7. The Problem of Translation

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  Constance Garnett's 1912 English translation was called 'the first adequate English translation' by Garth Terry, but it came at a cost. Academic Peter France, writing in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translations, notes that Garnett 'shortens and simplifies, muting Dostoevsky's jarring contrasts, sacrificing his insistent rhythms and repetitions'. She normalized Dostoevsky's idiosyncrasies to produce an acceptable English text, yet her versions were pioneering: they allowed what France calls 'this strange new voice to invade English literature'.

  David Magarshack's 1958 translation corrected some of Garnett's errors and aimed for a more contemporary style, but France found it 'even more thoroughly englished than Garnett's', missing some of the excitement of the foreign. David McDuff's later Penguin translation went to the opposite extreme. France writes that McDuff's literalism 'makes for difficult reading' and that the dialogue is 'sometimes impossibly odd, and as a result rather dead'.

  The translation that reshaped the novel's reception in English was released in 1990 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It won a PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 1991 and was praised by Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank as the most faithful to Dostoevsky's original Russian. France's assessment finds it a more satisfying compromise than its predecessors, though he notes that the desire to replicate Russian vocabulary and syntax sometimes produces 'unnecessary awkwardness and obscurity'. A new translation by Michael R. Katz appeared in 2023, extending the novel's long and unresolved conversation with the English language.