The Brothers KaramazovThe last and greatest work by the nineteenth-century Russian writer and philosopher: “The most magnificent novel ever written” (Sigmund Freud). “[The Brothers Karamazov] is a philosophical novel, a family drama, a murder mystery, and a love story. It’s also an immortal masterpiece. “The ferocious, idiosyncratic vitality of Dostoyevsky’s fiction captures readers again and again. So do his indelible characters. “From the novel’s earliest scenes introducing the Karamazovs—the brothers and their drunken, obnoxious father—Dostoyevsky acknowledges that ideas can’t exist without people and that people are the true subject of any novel. Those scenes are both a searching debate about faith and virtue and a sequence that’s recognizable to anyone who has ever spent the holidays with [a] collection of family members ranging from the endearing to the intolerable. It is also, if you ignore Dostoyevsky’s reputation for seriousness, very funny . . . If Ivan’s existential confusion doesn’t speak to you, the Karamazovs’ complicated love lives, both sordid and transcendent, never fail to fascinate. Their problems, however grounded in their particular moment in Russian history, seem only a hair’s breadth away from our own. How powerful is love? Hate? Blood? Money? Faith? What makes this great novel immortal is not its answers but its questions, questions we continue to ask ourselves, decades after the world that forged The Brothers Karamazov has passed away.” —Laura Miller, Slate “There is no writer who better demonstrates the contradictions and fluctuations of the creative mind than Dostoyevsky, and nowhere more astonishingly than in The Brothers Karamazov.” —Joyce Carol Oates |
Contents
Peasant Women Who Have Faith | |
A Lady of Little Faith | |
Why Is Such a Man Alive? | |
The Sufferings of a Soul the First Ordeal | |
The Second Ordeal | |
The Third Ordeal | |
The Prosecutor Catches Mitya | |
Mityas Great Secret Received with Hisses | |
The Evidence of the Witnesses the Babe | |
They Carry Mitya Away | |
Kolya Krassotkin | |
A Young Man Bent on a Career | |
The Scandalous Scene | |
In the Servants Quarters | |
Lizaveta | |
The Confession of a Passionate HeartIn Anecdote | |
The Confession of a Passionate HeartHeels | |
Father Ferapont | |
At His Fathers | |
A Meeting with the Schoolboys | |
The Engagement | |
Smerdyakov with a Guitar | |
Father Zossima and His Visitors | |
The Duel | |
Alyosha | |
The Breath of Corruption | |
A Critical Moment | |
An Onion | |
Cana of Galilee | |
Mitya | |
Kuzma Samsonov | |
Lyagavy | |
GoldMines | |
In the Dark | |
A Sudden Resolution | |
I Am Coming Too | |
The First and Rightful Lover | |
Delirium | |
The Preliminary Investigation Chapter I The Beginning of Perhotins Official Career | |
The Alarm | |
Children | |
The Schoolboy | |
The Lost | |
By Ilushas Bedside | |
Precocity | |
Ilusha | |
Ican | |
At Grushenkas | |
The Injured Foot | |
A Little Demon | |
A Hymn and a Secret | |
Not You Not You | |
The First Interview with Smerdyakov | |
The Second Visit to Smerdyakov | |
Part IV | |
The Devil Ivans Nightmare | |
It Was He Who Said That | |
A Judicial Error | |
The Fatal | |
Dangerous Witnesses | |
The Medical Experts and a Pound of Nuts | |
Fortune Smiles on Mitya | |
A Sudden Catastrophe | |
The Prosecutors Speech Sketches of Character | |
An Historical Survey | |
A Treatise on Smerdyakov | |
The Galloping Troika The End of the Prosecutors | |
Speech | |
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Common terms and phrases
Æsop afraid Alexey Fyodorovitch answer asked auto da fé began believe blessed brother child Church cried Alyosha dear Dmitri Fyodorovitch earth elder everything eyes face Father Ferapont Father Païssy Father Zossima feeling felt Fenya forgive Fyodor Pavlovitch gentlemen girl give Grigory Grushenka hand happened haste heard heart holy honor Ilusha Ispravnik Ivan Fyodorovitch Kalganov Karamazov Katerina Ivanovna kiss knew lady laughing Lise Listen live looked Madame Hohlakov mamma Marfa Maximov minute Miüsov Mokroe monastery monk Moscow mother never night Nikolay Parfenovitch Obdorsk once peasant perhaps Pyotr Alexandrovitch Pyotr Ilyitch Rakitin remember roubles Russian shouted silent sitting Smerdyakov smile soul speak stood strange suddenly talk tears tell Thee there's thing Thou didst thought three thousand to-day to-morrow told town turned understand versts voice waiting what's whole woman words yesterday young