The Brothers Karamazov Summary: Dostoevsky's Final Novel Explained
What it is about
The Brothers Karamazov was Fyodor Dostoevsky's sixteenth and final novel. He spent close to two years on it, and it ran as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. He died less than four months after it finished publication. It has since been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
The setting is a provincial Russian town in the nineteenth century, based largely on Staraya Russa, where Dostoevsky wrote much of the book. At the centre is Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a wealthy, dissolute landowner who has neglected all three of his sons. Dmitri, the eldest, comes home to press a claim on his late mother's inheritance, which he believes his father is withholding. Father and son then fall into rivalry over the same woman, Grushenka. Dmitri is already engaged to Katerina Ivanovna, and already owes her three thousand roubles he has spent.
A meeting at the local monastery, arranged so the elder Zosima can mediate the inheritance quarrel, collapses into scandal through Fyodor Pavlovich's deliberate clowning. Later Dmitri assaults his father in his own house and threatens to come back and kill him. Those threats become the hinge of everything that follows, because Fyodor Pavlovich is murdered and three thousand roubles go missing.
Around that crime Dostoevsky builds a philosophical novel about God, free will and morality. It has also been described as a theological drama about faith, doubt and reason in a Russia that was modernising fast. The epigraph, taken from the Fourth Gospel, sets the terms: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it brings forth a mighty harvest.
The main characters
Dmitri is impulsive, a former army officer, generous and reckless by turns. He is the brother most obviously capable of violence and the one who most clearly loves life.
Ivan is the intellectual and the religious sceptic. His great scene is his explanation to Alyosha of why he rejects a divinely created world founded on the suffering of children, followed by his prose poem "The Grand Inquisitor". In it, a cardinal of the Spanish Inquisition arrests a returned Christ and accuses him of burdening humanity with the unbearable gift of free will. It is one of the most discussed passages in European fiction.
Alyosha is the youngest, a novice at the monastery under the elder Zosima. When Zosima dies, his body decomposes quickly, against the common expectation that a holy man's remains resist corruption. The scandal pushes Alyosha into a crisis of faith, and he comes out of it renewed.
Smerdyakov, the epileptic servant, is widely rumoured to be Fyodor Pavlovich's illegitimate son. He is the fourth Karamazov in all but name, and the novel's moral argument runs through him.
Katerina Ivanovna and Grushenka are not decorative figures. The debts, pride and wounded feeling attached to both women drive much of the plot towards its conclusion.
The themes
Family is the first of them, and it is family as damage rather than comfort. Fyodor Pavlovich neglected every son, and each of them carries a different version of the consequences.
Then there is moral responsibility. Smerdyakov's charge against Ivan is that if there is no God, everything is permitted, and that Ivan taught him so. The novel asks whether a man who thinks a thing shares guilt with the man who does it. That question is not settled neatly.
Justice is the third thread. A court weighs circumstantial evidence, a drunken letter and a sick man's testimony, and reaches a verdict the reader is in a position to test.
Running under all of it is faith against reason. Ivan argues the case against God with real force. Zosima and Alyosha answer not with argument but with a way of living.
How it ends
This section gives away the ending.
Dmitri goes to his father's house at night carrying a brass pestle. The narration breaks off at the window. He flees, striking the old servant Grigory with the pestle, then follows Grushenka to a nearby village, spends lavishly on a night of revelry and wins a declaration of love from her, at which point the police arrive and arrest him.
He insists he is innocent. Ivan visits Smerdyakov three times, and at the last visit Smerdyakov confesses that he faked his seizure, killed Fyodor Pavlovich and took the money. Ivan, feverish, hallucinates the devil as a shabby gentleman. Alyosha arrives with news that Smerdyakov has hanged himself. At the trial Ivan's account is dismissed as delirium, Katerina Ivanovna produces a letter in which Dmitri drunkenly wrote that he would kill his father, and Dmitri is convicted and sentenced to twenty years of hard labour in Siberia.
In the epilogue Ivan and Katerina Ivanovna plan Dmitri's escape to America, Dmitri and Katerina Ivanovna are reconciled, and the book closes at the funeral of Ilyusha, a consumptive boy whose father Dmitri had publicly humiliated. Alyosha urges the schoolboys to keep the memory of their friend, and of that moment, alive.
Why it still matters
It works on two levels at once. There is a murder, a suspect, an investigation and a trial, which keeps the story moving. Underneath that sits a sustained argument about whether goodness is possible without belief, and who is really guilty when a crime has many authors.
The Grand Inquisitor chapter alone has been argued over for well more than a century. The wider novel is long and demanding, and it rewards readers who want fiction to take moral questions seriously rather than resolve them. If you are coming to Dostoevsky for the first time, know that this was the last thing he wrote, and that it gathers everything he had been working towards.
