Summary: The Brothers Karamazov

The GIST

The Brothers Karamazov is Fyodor Dostoevsky's sixteenth and last novel. He spent nearly two years writing it, and it ran as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. He died less than four months after the final installment. He had said he would die happy if he could finish it, because then he would have expressed himself completely. On the surface it is a crime story: a dissolute father, three very different sons, a rumored fourth son working as the household servant, two fiercely proud women, and a missing sum of three thousand roubles. Under that surface it is a philosophical and theological drama about God, free will, faith, doubt and morality, set in a Russia that was modernizing fast and losing its old certainties.

Few novels have such a large reputation. Albert Einstein called it the summit of all literature. Sigmund Freud called it the most magnificent novel ever written. Ludwig Wittgenstein reportedly knew whole passages by heart and took a copy with him to the front in the First World War. William Faulkner reread it regularly. Camus and Sartre turned its rebel intellectual, Ivan, into an icon of existentialist revolt. Not everyone was won over: Nabokov, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence and Tchaikovsky all had their doubts. Even so, the novel remains the place where Dostoevsky put the biggest questions he knew how to ask, and he put them in the mouths of characters so alive that readers argue with them as if they were real people.

The Story

The book opens with a line from the Gospel of John that works as a key to everything after it: "Unless a corn of wheat falleth into the ground and dieth, it abideth alone. But if it dieth, it bringeth forth the mighty harvest."

The setting is a provincial Russian town modeled on Staraya Russa, where Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel. Its most notorious citizen is Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. He is fifty-five, wealthy, lecherous, a compulsive liar and a born buffoon who seems to enjoy humiliating himself as much as he enjoys humiliating others. He has married twice and ignored every child he fathered, so his sons grew up apart from him and from one another, raised by servants and relatives. Now, as adults, they gather in his town, and the family's buried resentments start to come out.

Dmitri, called Mitya, is the eldest. He is twenty-eight, a former army officer and the only child of the first marriage. Like his father he is a sensualist who drinks and carouses, yet he is passionately attached to his own idea of honor. He has come home to claim the inheritance from his late mother, and he believes his father has been cheating him out of it with small handouts. He is engaged to the proud Katerina Ivanovna, whose father he once rescued from a debt. The engagement rests more on wounded pride than on love, and Dmitri owes her three thousand roubles that he has already spent. Then he falls hard for Grushenka. She is twenty-two, beautiful and fiery, has a reputation in town, was once jilted by a Polish officer, and lived for years under the protection of a tyrannical miser. The trouble is that old Fyodor wants her too. Father and son become open rivals over money and over the same woman, and Grushenka enjoys playing them against each other.

Ivan, twenty-four, is the middle son and the first child of the second marriage. He is reserved, aloof and brilliant, a skeptic who writes articles that people talk about. He finds his father repulsive and dislikes Dmitri, and Fyodor admits he fears Ivan more than he fears his hot-tempered eldest. Ivan is in love with Katerina Ivanovna, but she keeps raising moral barriers between them because she is determined to play the noble martyr to Dmitri. Ivan's great idea, that if there is no God, everything is permitted, runs through the novel and ends up doing damage he never intended.

Alexei, called Alyosha, is twenty and the youngest. The narrator names him the hero of the book. He is a novice at the local monastery under the revered elder Father Zosima, and nearly everyone loves him. He moves between his feuding relatives as a peacemaker who listens without judging. Dmitri calls him his "cherub." Dostoevsky gave him the name of his own three-year-old son, Alyosha, who died of epilepsy in May 1878 while the book was being written, and that grief can be felt throughout the novel.

In the background is Smerdyakov, the household lackey and cook. His mother was "Reeking Lizaveta," a mute woman of the streets who died giving birth in Fyodor's bathhouse, and his name means "son of the reeking one." Rumor says Fyodor is his father. He was raised by the old servant Grigory and his wife Marfa. He hanged cats as a boy and gave them mock funerals, he suffers from epilepsy, and he looks down on nearly everyone except Ivan, whose ideas he takes in eagerly. The Karamazovs all underestimate how shrewd he is.

The story gets going with a meeting at the monastery, arranged so that Zosima can mediate the inheritance quarrel. Fyodor wrecks it with deliberate clowning. Soon afterward Dmitri bursts into his father's house, beats him, and threatens to come back and kill him. In the following days Ivan sits down with Alyosha in a tavern and explains why he cannot accept God's world. He then recites the prose poem he has composed, "The Grand Inquisitor." Not long after, Zosima dies. The townsfolk expect a holy man's body to resist decay, but his body decays quickly, and the resulting scandal throws Alyosha into a crisis of faith.

Dmitri, meanwhile, is frantic to repay Katerina before he runs away with Grushenka, and he cannot raise the money. One night he goes to his father's house carrying a brass pestle. The narration breaks off at the window. The next thing we see is Dmitri fleeing the property and striking old Grigory when the servant tries to stop him. He chases Grushenka to a nearby village, spends money wildly on a night of revelry, and finally hears her say she loves him. At the end of that night the police arrive and arrest him for murdering his father and stealing three thousand roubles. Dmitri insists he is innocent and tells an unlikely story about where his money came from, but the circumstantial evidence against him is overwhelming.

Alongside the murder plot runs a tender subplot. Dmitri once publicly humiliated Captain Snegiryov, a poor officer whom Fyodor had hired to pressure him over his debts. The captain's young son Ilyusha is tormented at school because of his father's disgrace, and he lashes out at the other boys. Alyosha befriends Ilyusha, the clever, show-off schoolboy Kolya Krasotkin, and the rest of the gang, and slowly works on their hearts. This thread also reflects Dostoevsky's grief for his own son. How the trial ends, what becomes of each brother, and where the boys' story leads are best found out on the page.

What It's Really About

Faith against doubt. Dostoevsky set up the novel as a contest between two worldviews. One is the new creed of atheism, rationalism, socialism and nihilism, which he saw spreading among Russia's young people. The other is the lived Orthodox Christianity of Zosima and Alyosha. He refused to rig the argument, though. In the chapter "Rebellion" Ivan builds his case against God out of the very value at the heart of Christianity, which is compassion. He lists horrors inflicted on children, and Dostoevsky took every one of them from real newspaper accounts and historical sources. Ivan says that no future harmony could justify those tears, so he will "humbly return the ticket." His point is not that God does not exist. He rejects the world God made. That is what makes the argument so hard to answer: it is a refusal of God made for the sake of love.

The Grand Inquisitor. Ivan's poem is probably the most famous passage in the book. Christ returns to sixteenth-century Seville during the Spanish Inquisition, and an aged cardinal has him arrested. In a long night-time speech the Inquisitor accuses Christ of placing an unbearable burden on humanity, which is freedom. Ordinary people, he argues, want bread, miracles and authority. The Church has lovingly taken their freedom from them, using the very temptations Christ refused in the desert. Christ says nothing through the whole speech. His single response at the end is ambiguous and has been debated ever since. The critic Mikhail Bakhtin read the poem as a dialogue that turns against itself, with Ivan arguing with his own soul. Aldous Huxley and David Foster Wallace both refer to it.

Zosima's answer. Dostoevsky meant Book VI, "The Russian Monk," as his reply. It is not a debating rebuttal. It is a portrait of a holy life, written in a deliberately different, serene and old-fashioned style, drawn partly from the 18th-century saint Tikhon of Zadonsk and from Father Ambrose, whom Dostoevsky met at Optina Monastery in 1878. Zosima teaches that everyone is responsible for everyone and for everything, that we must not judge one another, that masters and servants are spiritual brothers, and that hell is the suffering of being unable to love. Dostoevsky knew this sort of answer would seem strange to his contemporaries, and he took the risk anyway.

Freedom of the soul. The novel argues against every effort to reduce people to machinery. Dmitri uses the name of the physiologist Claude Bernard as an insult, because to him it stands for the scientific claim that the soul is just nerves and chemistry. Bakhtin called this quality the "unfinalizability" of Dostoevsky's characters: none of them can be fully explained from outside, by heredity, ideology or anyone else's judgment. They keep surprising us, and themselves.

Guilt, fathers and sons. At its core the plot is about patricide. Freud read it in Oedipal terms and connected it to the death of Dostoevsky's own brutal father. Kafka, who struggled with his own father, felt he and Dostoevsky were "blood relatives." The novel keeps asking a disturbing question: who is guilty of a crime? Is it only the person who strikes the blow, or also the people who wished for it, stood aside, or supplied the idea?

Readers love the book because of its range. It works as a gripping murder mystery, a family melodrama with real comedy (Fyodor's buffoonery, the defense lawyer's malapropisms), a romance, and a philosophical argument all at once. The narrator is fussy and gossipy and becomes a character himself, and there is no single voice of authority. Readers have to make up their own minds. Some find the philosophical digressions slow. Hemingway wondered how a man could write so badly and still make you feel so deeply. Many readers return to it all the same, because Dostoevsky shows life as it is, with no tidy consolation.

Who Should Read It

This book is for patient readers who want a novel that wrestles openly with God, suffering and freedom while also delivering a murder, a trial and a set of unforgettable characters. It suits lovers of the classics, people of faith and determined skeptics alike, and anyone curious about the roots of existentialism. If you choose a translation, Pevear and Volokhonsky's is widely praised. If you only want a taste first, start with "The Grand Inquisitor."

This has been a summary of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.