The Brothers Karamazov

This book narrates the story of the dysfunctional family of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei. Fyodor Pavlovich had little interest in raising his sons, as he is a hedonist — preferring to party, womanize and drink. Consequently, all three of his sons were raised quite differently. He is also said to be the father of an illegitimate son, Pavel.

Fyodor, and his three sons, are the focal point of this book.

Within these characters, Dostoevsky explores the concept of God, free will, religion, and contemporary Western philosophy.

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Key Facts about The Brothers Karamazov

• Title: The Brother’s Karamazov
• When/Where written: 1880, Russia
• Genre: Theological Fiction
• Setting: Russia

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About Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky was born into a middle-class family in Czarist, Russia in 1821. His father was a doctor who treated patients in a charitable hospital, and this led Dostoevsky to witness a lot of suffering and pain that most children his age were shielded from.

Dostoevsky lost his father while he was still in school, and this caused Dostoevsky much pain. He soon began gambling and keeping friends with radical ideas. It wasn’t long before the government decided to clamp down on dissent, and in the process, Dostoevsky and his friends were arrested and sentenced to be executed by a firing squad.

As if by divine intervention, at the last minute, the government pardoned their crimes and instead sent them off to work in a labor camp for four years in Siberia.

Upon Dostoevsky’s release after four grueling years of hard labor, he decided he wouldn’t waste any more of his time. He wrote his first book titled ‘Notes from The Underground.’ It was a grim look at humanity and our propensity to gravitate toward things that cause us pain and suffering.

His second book ‘Crime and Punishment’ was more popular. This work looks into human identity and how we delude ourselves into thinking we know more about ourselves than we do. It resonated deeply with his Christian upbringing and the prevailing Christian orthodoxy of Russia at the time. Dostoevsky attempted to show the humanist side of us — the cynic we believe we are is nothing but a mirage — an identity impressed upon us by others. “We are good people, deep down,” Dostoevsky summarizes.

Dostoevsky’s third book ‘The Idiot’ explored his life just as he was about to get executed. On the day of his execution, he noticed the glow of the cathedral roofing, glistening in all of its splendor. He had never noticed such beauty in something as benign as a cathedral roof, yet here we were, reveling in the charm of something so pedestrian. From the commutation of his sentence, Dostoevsky proceeds to take pleasure and delight in the tiniest of things and thus appears to others as an idiot. Here, Dostoevsky points out that knowledge is a burden, and the intellectual, the rational, and the logician, are all cursed with knowledge. It is their knowledge that keeps them from taking delight in the smallest things.

This ties nicely into his last book ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ Dostoevsky was ill when he penned down this literary masterpiece and, as such, packed it with a lot of unpublished stories from his life with a hodgepodge.

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Thematic Arc of The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov was penned with so much angst, and urgency as Dostoevsky felt his days were numbered. In this book, Dostoevsky juxtaposed the intellectual enlightenment of Fyodor Pavlovich’s second son, Ivan, and that of his religious third son, Alexei. For Dostoevsky, ignorance truly is bliss, as he seeks to establish that the process of questioning everything and rejecting immutable foundations of religion leads to chaos and despair.

Dostoevsky doesn’t seek to impose his ideas on his readers forcefully, rather, he sought to get them thinking about free will and whether absolute freedom was desirable. For Dostoevsky, “without God, everything is permissible.” He thought a communal, religious-based way of life was the best way to live.

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Impact of The Brothers Karamazov