The Karamazov Brothers - Fyodor Dostoevsky

About the Book

As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around the writhings of this one dysfunctional family Dostoevsky weaves a dense network of social, psychological and philosophical relationships.

At the same time he shows - from the opening 'scandal' scene in the monastery to a personal appearance by an eccentric Devil - that his dramatic skills have lost nothing of their edge. The Karamazov Brothers, completed a few months before Dostoevsky's death in 1881, remains for many the high point of his genius as novelist and chronicler of the modern malaise.

It cast a long shadow over D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and other giants of twentieth-century European literature.

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) is a Russian novelist. Of his eleven novels, his three most famous were written later in life: 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot' and 'The Brothers Karamazov'. His books have been translated into over 170 languages, and have sold over 15 million copies.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, the second son of a former army doctor. Between 1838 and 1843 he studied at the St Petersburg Engineering Academy, from whence he graduated as a military engineer, but he resigned in 1844 to devote himself to writing. In 1849 he was arrested due to his membership of a socialist group. He was initially sentenced to death, but this was commuted to a prison sentence in a penal colony in Siberia, where he spent four years, followed by four years serving as a private soldier.

He returned to St Petersburg in 1854, having abandoned Socialism for a new belief in religion. In 1857 Dostoevsky married Maria Isaev and two years later he resigned from the army. During the early 1860s he travelled extensively in Europe, including a visit to London which he found very depressing because of his impressions of life in that city at the time. Both his wife and brother died in 1864-5 and Dostoevsky became loaded with debt, made worse by a personal addiction to gambling. In 1867 Dostoevsky married Anna Snitkin, with whom he travelled abroad until 1871.

By the time that his book The Karamazov Brothers was published, Dostoevsky had become recognised within his own country as one of Russia’s greatest writers. He suffered from epilepsy all his life and died in St Petersburg on February 9th, 1881.

Dostoyevsky’s works of fiction include fifteen novels and novellas, seventeen short stories, and five translations. Apart from The Karamazov Brothers, his best known works are, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The House of the Dead andThe Gambler.

During the twentieth century he became the most widely read Russian author in England.