The Karamazov Brothers

The Karamazov Brothers--------------------------------------------------Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880)is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophicaldebate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered,his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, andthe saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved. Boundup with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of manydeeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of humanfreedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disatrous consequencesof rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian OrthodoxChurch, the legal system, and even the authors most cherisehd causesand beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy,and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrongare no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it the allegoryfor the world's maturity, but with children to the fore. This newtranslation does full justice to Doestoevsky's genius, particularlyin the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every mode of humanexpression.