The Brothers Karamazov
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov is the youngest of three brothers bound to Fyodor Pavlovitch, a buffoonish, dissolute landowner whose greed and appetites have poisoned his family. Sensual Dmitri, intellectual Ivan, and gentle, devout Alyosha are each drawn into bitter conflict with their father—over a disputed inheritance and a shared rivalry for the same woman. When Fyodor is found murdered, suspicion falls on Dmitri, and the resulting investigation and trial expose the hatreds, secrets, and divided loyalties that run through the household, forcing each son to reckon with his own share of guilt.
Dostoyevsky turns this family tragedy into a profound inquiry into faith, doubt, free will, and moral responsibility. Through the brothers' opposing temperaments he stages an unflinching debate about whether God exists, whether suffering can be justified, and what we owe one another. Famous for chapters like "The Grand Inquisitor," the novel remains one of the supreme achievements of world literature, probing the deepest questions of the human conscience.
How it begins
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men’s tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.