The Brothers Karamazov
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
As the largest of Dostoevsky’s works and his last novel before he died, The Brothers Karamazov is remembered as his magnum opus. In this philsophical masterwork, Dostoevsky tells the story of the three Karamazov brothers—the monastic novice Alyosha, the unbeliever Ivan, and the soldier Dmitri. The spiritual drama that unfolds encompasses philosophical and spiritual issues in a sweeping spectrum, breaking into morality and free will, tradition and progress, and faith and doubt. In no time, this masterwork was accalaimed a masterpeice in world literature, and has had major influence over other authors and philosophers, including Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Cormac McCarthy, Martin Heidegger, Kurt Vonnegut, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ernest Hemingway.
Top Highlights
“As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.” (Page 4)
“An elder was one who took your soul, your will, into his soul and his will. When you choose an elder, you renounce your own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete self-abnegation. This novitiate, this terrible school of abnegation, is undertaken voluntarily, in the hope of self-conquest, of self-mastery, in order, after a life of obedience, to attain perfect freedom, that is, from self; to escape the lot of those who have lived their whole life without finding their true selves in themselves.” (Page 24)
“Mitya, or rather Dmitri Fyodorovitch, was the only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s three sons who grew up in the belief that he had property, and that he would be independent on coming of age.” (Page 6)
“Finally, she left the house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovitch with a destitute divinity student, leaving Mitya, a child of three years old, in her husband’s hands.” (Page 3)
“The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.” (Page 68)
Fyodor Dostoevsky was born to minor Russian nobility in 1821. He entered the military academy at age 17. While an engineer in the army, he translated works from French and wrote his first fiction for money on the side. He became a member of the utopian socialist Petrashevsky circle. He was arrested for reading banned political literature and sentenced to death by firing squad in 1849. The execution was stayed at the last moment when a letter arrived from the Tsar pardoning him. Instead, Dostoevsky was exiled to Siberia and four years hard of labor, shackled hand and foot. During his sentence, the only thing he could read was the New Testament. Upon his release, his gambling addiction frequently left him in poverty, and he began a financially tumultuous marriage to his secretary. He died in 1881 after suffering a pulmonary hemorrhage. Together with Tolstoy, he is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential novelist of Russian literature’s golden age.