The Brothers Karamazov Unpacked: Three Sons, One Murdered Father and the Question of God

In The Brothers Karamazov, the father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, is killed by Smerdyakov, the servant widely rumoured to be his illegitimate son, but the eldest son Dmitri is arrested, tried and convicted for the murder, while the middle son Ivan is left to wonder whether his own ideas made the crime possible. That twist sits at the heart of Fyodor Dostoevsky's sixteenth and final novel, serialised in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880 and acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements of world literature. It is a murder story, a family drama and a long argument about God, freedom and responsibility. This guide gives away the whole plot, so stop here if you want to discover the solution yourself.

Dostoevsky's last word

Fyodor Dostoevsky is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in Russian and world literature, and his earlier books include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and Demons. He spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov and died less than four months after it was published. He had planned a sequel following the youngest brother into later life, but it was never written.

The novel grew out of older plans, including an unfinished project called The Life of a Great Sinner, and out of a personal loss. In May 1878 Dostoevsky's three-year-old son Alyosha died of epilepsy, a condition inherited from his father. The writer named his young hero Alyosha, and his grief can also be felt in the story of the poor Captain Snegiryov and his sick son Ilyusha. After the death, Dostoevsky visited the Optina Monastery, which shaped the novel's monastery scenes and the figure of the elder Zosima. Much of the book was written in the town of Staraya Russa, which inspired its provincial setting.

How the book opens

The novel begins with a verse from the Gospel of John: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. The image of death leading to new life returns again and again. The story is told by a talkative narrator who presents himself as a writer and, in the opening chapter, names Alyosha, the youngest brother, as the hero of the novel. That narrator becomes almost a character in his own right, commenting on events and gossip as he goes.

Meet the Karamazovs

Fyodor Pavlovich, the father, is a wealthy, greedy and deliberately vulgar landowner who neglected all of his sons, so that they grew up apart from him and from each other. Dmitri, or Mitya, the eldest, is a passionate former army officer who drinks, spends wildly and believes his father is withholding his inheritance. He is engaged to the proud Katerina Ivanovna but falls in love with Grushenka, a young woman his father also desires.

Ivan, the middle son, is reserved and brilliant, a writer of articles and a religious sceptic. His idea that "if there is no God, everything is permitted" echoes through the book. Alyosha, the youngest, is a novice at the local monastery and a peacemaker whom nearly everyone loves. Then there is Smerdyakov, the family servant, an epileptic who is widely believed to be Fyodor Pavlovich's illegitimate son. Around them move Grushenka, fiery and independent; Katerina, who wants to act as a noble martyr; and Father Zosima, the elder who guides Alyosha.

The story in brief (spoilers)

Dmitri and his father quarrel over money and over Grushenka. Dmitri also owes Katerina three thousand roubles that he has already spent. A family meeting at the monastery, meant to let Zosima settle the dispute, collapses into scandal because the father deliberately plays the clown, and later Dmitri bursts into his father's house, beats him and threatens to come back and kill him.

In the following days Ivan tells Alyosha why he cannot accept a world built on the suffering of children, and recites his prose poem "The Grand Inquisitor". Soon afterwards Zosima dies. People expect the body of a holy man to resist decay; instead it decays quickly, the town is scandalised, and Alyosha goes through a crisis of faith from which he emerges renewed.

One night Dmitri, desperate to repay Katerina so that he can leave with Grushenka, goes to his father's house carrying a brass pestle. The narration stops at the window. Next we see Dmitri running away and striking the old servant Grigory, who tries to stop him. Dmitri then follows Grushenka to a nearby village, spends lavishly on a night of celebration and wins her declaration of love, and at dawn the police arrest him for his father's murder and the theft of three thousand roubles. The evidence looks overwhelming, because the only other person in the house was Smerdyakov, apparently helpless after a seizure.

Ivan visits Smerdyakov three times. In the last visit Smerdyakov confesses that he faked the seizure, killed the father and took the money, and he insists that Ivan was his accomplice: Ivan left the house, and Ivan taught him that without God everything is permitted. Ivan, already feverish, has a hallucination in which the devil appears as a shabby gentleman, and Alyosha interrupts it with the news that Smerdyakov has taken his own life. At the trial Ivan's account is dismissed as delirium, Katerina produces a drunken letter in which Dmitri had threatened his father, and Dmitri is sentenced to twenty years of hard labour in Siberia. The novel ends not in court but at the funeral of the boy Ilyusha, where Alyosha asks a group of schoolboys to keep the memory of their friend alive.

The Grand Inquisitor and the big questions

The most famous chapters belong to Ivan. In "Rebellion" he argues that the suffering of innocent children cannot be justified by any future harmony, and so he respectfully "returns the ticket" to God. In "The Grand Inquisitor", a cardinal of the Spanish Inquisition arrests Christ, who has returned to Earth, and accuses him of burdening humanity with free will. It is one of the best-known passages in modern literature because it leaves its questions about freedom, power and human nature open.

Dostoevsky meant the following book, "The Russian Monk", built around Zosima's life and teachings, as his reply: a picture of active love, of refusing to judge others, and of hell as the suffering of being unable to love. The novel also defends human freedom against the idea that people are just products of physiology and environment; Dmitri even uses the name of the scientist Claude Bernard as an insult. Critics note that there is no single voice of authority in the story. Each character speaks in his or her own style, and the reader has to weigh the arguments.

Why it still matters

The list of admirers is remarkable. Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami are among the people influenced by it. Sigmund Freud called it the most magnificent novel ever written, and Ivan's revolt became a touchstone for Albert Camus. Not everyone agreed: Henry James, Nabokov and D. H. Lawrence were critical, and Tchaikovsky called Dostoevsky a genius but an antipathetic one.

If you have already read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, you will recognise the fever, the long conversations and the moral pressure. The Brothers Karamazov is wider: it has comedy, a courtroom drama and a children's story inside it. A practical tip is to remember that nearly everyone has several names. Dmitri is also Mitya, Alexei is Alyosha, and Agrafena is Grushenka. Once you know that, the crowd becomes a family.

Learn with The Brothers Karamazov: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
everything is permitted	there are no moral limits	Without rules, he thought, everything is permitted.
circumstantial evidence	facts that suggest guilt but do not prove it	The case rested on circumstantial evidence.
to return the ticket	to refuse to accept something on principle	Ivan politely returns the ticket to God.
a crisis of faith	a period of serious doubt about beliefs	After the loss, she went through a crisis of faith.
to play the fool	to act silly on purpose	The father played the fool at the monastery.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a detective story you know, using "circumstantial evidence" and "a crisis of faith" or "play the fool".