The Brothers Karamazov

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

1880

Philosophical fiction

Dostoevsky's final novel, a sprawling family drama about the dissolute Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons — Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha — staging in miniature the great Russian arguments of the late nineteenth century: faith versus atheism, free will, the problem of evil, and what holds a person together when God is in question. Built around a patricide that doubles as a courtroom drama and a theological inquest.