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The Brothers Karamazov
10Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's final novel and his summation — a murder mystery, a theological argument, and a portrait of human freedom that Freud called the most magnificent novel ever written.
GBM Assessment (Score: 10/10)
The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel about faith, doubt, and human freedom, a work of such philosophical depth and narrative power that figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Jean-Paul Sartre have each cited it as the supreme achievement of the novel form. The Grand Inquisitor chapter — in which Christ returns to earth only to be condemned by the Church — stands as the highest point of philosophical fiction, dramatizing the eternal conflict between freedom and security, faith and institutional power.
First appearing in 1880 as Dostoevsky's final crowning achievement, The Brothers Karamazov distributes the fundamental aspects of human nature across three brothers: Ivan the intellectual, Dmitri the sensualist, and Alyosha the man of faith. The Grand Inquisitor parable, in which the returned Christ is told by the Church that humanity cannot bear the burden of freedom, remains a powerful and disturbing passages in all of literature.
Russia, Brazil & America, 1880-1881
Dostoevsky publishes The Brothers Karamazov and dies January 1881. Tsar Alexander II is assassinated by revolutionaries in March. Machado de Assis in Brazil writes with an irony that anticipates modernism by decades. Henry James publishes The Portrait of a Lady, pioneering the psychological novel and point-of-view technique. The Gilded Age in America; the late Victorian era in Britain. Three literary traditions are simultaneously reaching new heights of psychological depth.
Awards & Adaptations
Freud, Einstein, Sartre cited as greatest novel.
Recommended Edition
Pevear & Volokhonsky (1990); Garnett (1912)
