The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) is Dostoevsky’s last novel and, for many readers — Freud, Einstein, Wittgenstein (who read it so often he knew passages by heart), Kafka, Camus — the greatest novel ever written. It is a murder mystery: a dissolute old father is killed, and one of his sons is convicted. It is a family drama of three brothers and a half-brother, two proud women, and a holy elder. And it contains the most powerful argument against God in literature — Ivan’s “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor” — together with Dostoevsky’s attempt to answer it, not with a counter-argument but with a life.

This page tells the whole story, book by book. You need not have read it.

At a glance

Author	Fyodor Dostoevsky
Published	Serialized in The Russian Messenger, January 1879 – November 1880
Setting	Skotoprigonyevsk (“Cattle-pen town”), a provincial town modelled on Staraya Russa, and its monastery; the 1860s
Structure	Four parts, twelve books, and an epilogue; a narrator who is a gossipy local resident
Key themes	God and the problem of evil; freedom; guilt and universal responsibility; fathers and sons; love and pride; “everything is permitted”

The family

• Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov — the father: 55, a wealthy, coarse, cynical buffoon and voluptuary who made his fortune as a sponger and neglected all his children.
• Dmitri Fyodorovich (Mitya) — 28, the eldest, from Fyodor’s first wife: a retired army officer, passionate, generous, reckless, sensual, honourable in his own way. “The Karamazov in him”.
• Ivan Fyodorovich (Vanya) — 24, from the second wife: a brilliant, cold, proud intellectual and atheist, author of articles. See Ivan Karamazov.
• Alexei Fyodorovich (Alyosha, Alyoshka) — 20, from the second wife: a novice at the monastery under the elder Zosima; loving, chaste, attentive — “the hero” of the novel. See Alyosha Karamazov.
• Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov — Fyodor’s servant and cook, probably his illegitimate son by a holy fool, Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya (“stinking Lizaveta”); epileptic, resentful, contemptuous of Russia, disciple of Ivan’s ideas.

Others

• Father Zosima — the elder (starets) of the monastery, Alyosha’s spiritual father.
• Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva (Katya) — Dmitri’s proud fiancée, loved by Ivan.
• Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova (Grushenka) — a beautiful, independent “infernal woman”, desired by both Dmitri and his father.
• Ilyusha Snegiryov — a sick schoolboy, son of the impoverished Captain Snegiryov, whom Dmitri humiliated.
• Kolya Krasotkin — a precocious 13-year-old “socialist” schoolboy.
• Rakitin — a cynical seminarian; Grigory — Fyodor’s old servant; Madame Khokhlakova and her daughter Liza.

Plot summary

A Nice Little Family. The narrator introduces Fyodor Pavlovich and his neglected sons, raised by servants and relatives. Alyosha, the youngest, has come home and entered the monastery, drawn by the elder Zosima.

An Inappropriate Gathering. To settle a money dispute between Fyodor and Dmitri, the family meets in Zosima’s cell. Fyodor clowns outrageously. The talk turns to Ivan’s article on church and state, and someone reports Ivan’s view: if humanity lost faith in immortality, love would dry up, and “everything would be permitted, even cannibalism”. Dmitri arrives late and quarrels with his father over Grushenka; Fyodor challenges him to a duel. Zosima rises and bows to the ground before Dmitri — a mysterious gesture: he sees the suffering ahead of him. He tells Alyosha he must leave the monastery and live in the world.

The Sensualists. Dmitri, hiding in a garden, makes Alyosha his confidant in three ecstatic “confessions of an ardent heart”: his love of Schiller, of debauchery, of life. “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing!… There God and the devil are fighting, and the battlefield is the heart of man.” He tells how Katerina Ivanovna once came to him to borrow money to save her father’s honour, prepared to give herself — and he gave her the money and let her go. They are engaged; but he has fallen for Grushenka, and he spent 3,000 roubles Katerina gave him to send to her sister on a spree with Grushenka. He must repay it or be a thief. His father has put 3,000 roubles in an envelope, labelled “To my angel Grushenka, if she will come”. Meanwhile Smerdyakov is introduced arguing at dinner that a soldier might rightly renounce Christ to save his life. Dmitri bursts into his father’s house, beats him, and threatens to kill him.

Lacerations. Zosima is dying. Alyosha runs errands of mercy. He meets schoolboys throwing stones at a sick boy, Ilyusha, who bites his finger. He learns why: Dmitri publicly humiliated Ilyusha’s father, Captain Snegiryov, dragging him by his beard from a tavern while the boy begged for mercy. Alyosha brings Snegiryov 200 roubles from Katerina; the captain, poor and proud, is moved — then tramples the money in the snow.

Pro and Contra. The heart of the novel. In a tavern, Ivan and Alyosha talk for the first time as brothers. Ivan says he wants to live — he loves “the sticky little leaves” of spring — even without faith. But he cannot accept God’s world.

In the chapter “Rebellion” (Rebellion — Returning the Ticket), Ivan tells stories he has collected of the torture of children: Turks who bayonet babies before their mothers’ eyes; a little girl locked by her educated parents all night in a freezing outhouse, beating her chest with her fist and praying to “dear, kind God”; a general who sets his hounds on an eight-year-old serf boy before his mother for injuring his dog’s paw. Ivan accepts that there may be a future harmony in which everything is explained and the mother embraces the torturer. But he refuses it:

I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it… too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket… It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.

He asks Alyosha: if you were building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy at last, and it were essential to torture to death one tiny creature — would you consent? “No, I wouldn’t consent,” Alyosha says softly. But there is one who can forgive everything, “because He gave His innocent blood for all”. Ivan has expected that — and answers with his prose-poem.

“The Grand Inquisitor” (The Grand Inquisitor). In sixteenth-century Seville, the day after a hundred heretics were burned, Christ returns, silently; the people recognize him; he raises a dead girl. The aged Grand Inquisitor has him arrested and visits him at night in his cell. Christ never speaks. The Inquisitor reproaches him: in the wilderness, the devil offered him three temptations — to turn stones into bread, to throw himself from the temple to prove God would save him, to take the kingdoms of the world. Christ refused them all for the sake of human freedom: he wanted faith freely given, not compelled by bread, miracle or power. But that was a terrible mistake. Humans are weak; “nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.” They want miracle, mystery and authority. “Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!” The Church has “corrected” Christ’s work, taken up the devil’s gifts out of love for weak humanity, and will rule a happy, unfree flock, bearing the burden of knowledge of good and evil for them. Tomorrow he will burn Christ.

Christ listens in silence; then he rises and kisses the old man on his bloodless lips. The Inquisitor shudders, opens the door: “Go, and come no more… come not at all, never, never!” The kiss glows in his heart, but he adheres to his idea.

Alyosha kisses Ivan: “Plagiarism!” cries Ivan, delighted. Ivan leaves for Moscow. Before going he talks with Smerdyakov, who hints that something may happen to Fyodor while he is away — Smerdyakov may have an epileptic fit; Dmitri may come. Ivan goes anyway. “It’s always worth speaking to a clever man,” Smerdyakov says.

The Russian Monk. Alyosha’s record of Zosima’s life and teachings: his elder brother Markel, dying young, who discovered that “each of us is guilty before all, for all, and I more than the others”; Zosima’s own youth as a rake who, on the morning of a duel, struck his servant, was overcome with shame, and refused to fire; a mysterious visitor who confessed to a murder committed years earlier. The teachings: love all God’s creation, every leaf and ray of light; hell is “the suffering of being unable to love”; do not judge; “each is responsible for all”.

Alyosha. Zosima dies — and, to the scandal of the monastery, his body begins to smell quickly; there is no miracle of incorruption. Alyosha’s faith is shaken; he lets the cynical Rakitin take him to Grushenka’s. But Grushenka, learning of Zosima’s death, treats him with compassion, and tells him the parable of the onion: a wicked woman who had done only one good deed — giving an onion to a beggar — is offered rescue from the lake of fire by her guardian angel, who holds out the onion for her to grasp; she kicks away the other sinners clinging to her, and the onion breaks. Alyosha returns to the monastery, falls asleep by Zosima’s coffin, and dreams of the wedding at Cana. He goes out under the stars, falls to the earth, kisses it, weeping, and rises “a resolute champion for life”. Three days later he leaves the monastery, as Zosima told him to.

Mitya. Dmitri, desperate for 3,000 roubles, runs all over town and the countryside trying to borrow it. Believing Grushenka has gone to his father, he takes a brass pestle and runs to the house. He watches his father through the window, waiting for Grushenka; in his own later words, “I don’t know whether God was watching over me then” — and he flees. Old Grigory catches him at the fence; Dmitri strikes him on the head with the pestle, leaving him bleeding, and runs off — and suddenly has a large sum of money. Learning that Grushenka has gone to meet her former lover, a Polish officer, at the village of Mokroye, Dmitri rushes there, spends wildly on a wild night of feasting, music and gypsies, and resolves to shoot himself at dawn. But Grushenka declares that she loves him. At that moment the police arrive: his father has been found murdered, the envelope torn open and empty.

The Preliminary Investigation. Dmitri is questioned through the night. He swears he did not kill his father. The money? He confesses, in shame, that it was half of Katerina’s 3,000, which he had kept sewn in a little bag around his neck — so that he would be only half a thief. No one believes him. He is arrested. He dreams of a starving peasant woman holding a crying baby in a burnt-out village: “Why is the babe weeping?” — and wakes resolved to suffer for all. “I accept the torture of accusation… not because I killed him, but because I meant to kill him.”

The Boys. Two months later. The schoolboys, led by Kolya Krasotkin, are reconciled with the dying Ilyusha through Alyosha’s patient friendship.

Brother Ivan. Ivan, back from Moscow, is falling ill. He visits Smerdyakov three times. At the third meeting, Smerdyakov reveals the truth: he killed Fyodor himself, faking an epileptic fit, and took the money — which he hands to Ivan from inside his stocking. He did it, he says, because of Ivan: “You murdered him; you are the real murderer, I was only your instrument.” Ivan had taught him that “everything is permitted”, and Ivan left town knowing what might happen — he wanted it. Ivan, horrified, resolves to confess at the trial. That night Smerdyakov hangs himself, leaving a note: “I destroy my life of my own will and desire, so as to throw no blame on anyone.”

Ivan, in a brain fever, is visited by the Devil — a shabby, gentlemanly sponger in an old-fashioned coat, who mocks him with his own ideas, quotes his youthful poems, and says he would like to be incarnated as a fat merchant’s wife lighting candles in church. Is he real, or Ivan’s hallucination? “You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom… You are the incarnation of myself, but only of one side of me… of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them.” Alyosha arrives with the news of Smerdyakov’s death.

A Judicial Error. Dmitri’s trial — a great public spectacle. Ivan, half-mad, produces the money and declares Smerdyakov the murderer, under his own inspiration; he raves and is carried out. Katerina Ivanovna, to save Ivan (whom she now loves), produces a letter Dmitri wrote her while drunk, threatening to kill his father — the decisive evidence. The prosecutor’s speech sees in the Karamazovs the “broad” Russian nature; the defence lawyer, brilliant and secular, argues that Fyodor did not deserve the name of father. The peasant jury convicts Dmitri.

Epilogue

Dmitri, sentenced to twenty years in Siberia, plans to escape to America with Grushenka. Katerina visits him; they confess their love and their hatred.

Little Ilyusha dies. After the funeral, by the great stone where the boy had wanted to be buried, Alyosha speaks to the twelve schoolboys:

Let us never forget how good it was here once, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling… Perhaps that one memory may keep us from great evil… Some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from home, is perhaps the best education.

“Hurrah for Karamazov!” the boys cry, and they go off, hand in hand, to the memorial dinner of pancakes.

The ideas

“Everything is permitted”

The phrase associated with the novel, всё позволено, is reported as Ivan’s idea: if there is no immortality, there is no virtue, and everything is permitted. Smerdyakov acts on it, literally. The often-quoted sentence “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” does not appear in that form in the novel — it is a compression of several passages. See Nihilism and Morality.

The problem of evil

Ivan’s “Rebellion” is the problem of evil at its strongest — not a logical argument that God cannot exist, but a moral refusal to accept any harmony bought with the suffering of innocents. See the argument Returning the Ticket and Suffering & Evil.

Freedom

The Grand Inquisitor argues that freedom is a burden most people cannot bear, and that true love for humanity means relieving them of it. This argument has been read as a prophecy of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Berdyaev), of the consumer society (Huxley’s Brave New World), and of paternalistic technology. See Freedom.

Universal responsibility

Zosima’s teaching — “each of us is guilty before all, for all” — is Dostoevsky’s answer: not an argument about God but a way of living. Emmanuel Levinas made it the epigraph of his ethics of infinite responsibility for the other.

Fathers and sons

Who killed Fyodor Karamazov? Smerdyakov struck the blow; Ivan supplied the idea and left the door open; Dmitri wished it and nearly did it; even Alyosha failed to watch over his brother. Freud, in “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928), linked the novel with Oedipus and Hamlet as the three masterpieces of parricide, and with the death of Dostoevsky’s own father.

The brothers as one soul

Readers often see the three brothers as parts of a single person: Dmitri the body and passions, Ivan the intellect, Alyosha the spirit — with Smerdyakov as the shadow of the intellect, ideas without conscience. Each is a Karamazov — “a Karamazov thirst for life”, as Ivan says.

Afterlife

Freud called it “the most magnificent novel ever written”. Einstein said Dostoevsky gave him more than any scientist, “more than Gauss”. Wittgenstein carried it with him in the First World War trenches. Camus adapted Ivan’s rebellion in The Rebel. It has been filmed many times, notably by Ivan Pyryev (1969) and Richard Brooks (1958, with Yul Brynner). Dostoevsky planned a sequel, in which Alyosha would become a revolutionary; he died three months after finishing it.

Using The Brothers Karamazov in conversation

• On moral nihilism: “if there is no God, everything is permitted” (with the warning that it’s a compression).
• On the problem of evil: Ivan returns the ticket — no harmony is worth a child’s tear.
• On freedom and authority: miracle, mystery and authority; “feed men, and then ask of them virtue”.
• On responsibility: “each of us is guilty before all, for all”.