The Brothers KaramazovFyodor Dostoyevsky
About The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky's , published in 1880, is the last and largest of his novels. A dissolute father and his four sons, the passionate Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan, the novice monk Alyosha, and the illegitimate Smerdyakov, converge on a murder that every one of them in some sense wills and only one of them commits. The plot is a family tragedy and a criminal trial. The substance of the book is the theological argument the family carries on around and through the plot.
The central chapters are the two Ivan gives to Alyosha in a tavern. "Rebellion" refuses God's world on the ground that the suffering of children cannot be justified by any future harmony. "The Grand Inquisitor," the poem Ivan tells in answer to his own refusal, puts the case that human beings do not want the freedom Christ offered them and that the Church has loved them enough to take it back. Ivan accepts God and rejects the world God made, and the novel spends the rest of its length tracing what that rejection costs the mind that holds it.
Against Ivan stands the elder Zosima, whose dying discourse supplies the book's positive theology: that each is responsible to all and for all, that active love is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams, that the earth is to be watered with tears and kissed. Dostoyevsky does not pretend Zosima answers Ivan as an argument answers an argument. The answer the novel offers is the life Alyosha goes out to live at the end. is the Syntopicon's chief modern source on god, sin, and liberty considered together.