num_pages: 905
description: The Brothers Karamazov is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger and completed in November 1880. Dostoyevsky intended it to be the first part in an epic story titled The Life of a Great Sinner, but he died less than four months after its publication. The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia. Dostoyevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which is also the main setting of the novel. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed all over the world by thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut and Pope Benedict XVI as one of the supreme achievements in literature.
language: English
title: The Brothers Karamazov; Backgrounds and Sources; Essays in Criticism
titlecomplete: The Brothers Karamazov; Backgrounds and Sources; Essays in Criticism
characters: Liza Khokhlakov, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, Mikhail Osipovich Rakitin, Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova, Pavel Smerdyakov, Father Zosima, the Elder, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva, Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, Nikolai Krassotkin, Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, Ilyusha Snegiryov, Katerina Ospovna Khokhlakov
genres: Classics, Philosophy, Religion, Russia, Novels, Russian Literature, Classic Literature, Literature, 19th Century, Fiction
ratings_count: 316329
places: Russia
publisher: W.W. Norton & Company