The Brothers Karamazov

The last and greatest work by the nineteenth-century Russian writer and philosopher: “The most magnificent novel ever written” (Sigmund Freud).

“[The Brothers Karamazov] is a philosophical novel, a family drama, a murder mystery, and a love story. It’s also an immortal masterpiece.

“The ferocious, idiosyncratic vitality of Dostoyevsky’s fiction captures readers again and again. So do his indelible characters.

“From the novel’s earliest scenes introducing the Karamazovs—the brothers and their drunken, obnoxious father—Dostoyevsky acknowledges that ideas can’t exist without people and that people are the true subject of any novel. Those scenes are both a searching debate about faith and virtue and a sequence that’s recognizable to anyone who has ever spent the holidays with [a] collection of family members ranging from the endearing to the intolerable. It is also, if you ignore Dostoyevsky’s reputation for seriousness, very funny . . . If Ivan’s existential confusion doesn’t speak to you, the Karamazovs’ complicated love lives, both sordid and transcendent, never fail to fascinate. Their problems, however grounded in their particular moment in Russian history, seem only a hair’s breadth away from our own. How powerful is love? Hate? Blood? Money? Faith? What makes this great novel immortal is not its answers but its questions, questions we continue to ask ourselves, decades after the world that forged The Brothers Karamazov has passed away.” —Laura Miller, Slate

“There is no writer who better demonstrates the contradictions and fluctuations of the creative mind than Dostoyevsky, and nowhere more astonishingly than in The Brothers Karamazov.” —Joyce Carol Oates