The Brothers Karamazov: A Norton Critical Edition

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
The final novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published as Bratya Karamazovy in 1879-80, and generally considered to be his masterpiece. It is the story of Fyodor Karamazov and his sons Alyosha, Dmitry, and Ivan. It is also a story of patricide, into the sordid unfolding of which Dostoyevsky introduces a love-hate struggle with profound psychological and spiritual implications. Throughout the whole novel there persists a search for faith, for God--the central idea of the work. The dramatization of Ivan's repudiation of God is concentrated in the famous "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor." A response to Ivan is contained in the preaching of the monk Zosima that the secret of universal harmony is not achieved by the mind but by the heart.


From the Publisher
This was Dostoyevsky's last and possibly greatest novel. Two of the brothers Karamazov, Mitya and Ivan, come under scrutiny following that most heinous of acts - parricide. One of them is punished following a dramatic and celebrated trial. But was he the guilty brother?


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Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880), is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disastrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the author's most cherished causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it 'the allegory for the world's maturity', but with children to the fore. This new translation does full justice to Dostoevsky's genius, particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of human expression.


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