The Brothers Karamazov

Author:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Edition:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 12th edition (June 14, 2002)

Summary:

The Brothers Karamazov is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing after which it was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. The author died less than four months after its publication.

The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel set in 19th-century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, judgment, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia, with a plot which revolves around the subject of patricide. Dostoyevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which inspired the main setting. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is the father, a 55-year-old “sponger” and buffoon who sires three sons during his two marriages. He is rumored to have fathered an illegitimate son, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov, whom he employs as his servant. Fyodor takes no interest in any of his sons, who are, as a result, raised apart from each other and their father. The relationship between the father and his adult sons drives much of the plot in the novel.

-The Brothers Karamazov. In Wikipedia.  Retrieved April 5, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov