The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

Karamazovshchina as a social phenomenon of the Russian society

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The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky , born in 1821 , was a great Russian prose writer . He was born in Moscow and studied at the St Petersburg Engineering Academy . His first published work was a translation of Balzac 's Eugynie Grandet , which appeared in 1844 . Two years later his first original works , the short stories Poor Folk , The Double were published , later followed by other short prose pieces (Leatherbarrow 47-48 ) In April 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested for suspected revolutionary

activity and condemned to death , or at least was taken to the scaffold and to the last moments before execution before the true sentence of four years in prison and four years as a private in the Siberian army was read out . He was released from the army in 1858 . The result of his imprisonment was the change of his personal convictions : he rejected the socialism and progressive ideas of his early years , and instead adhered to the principles of the Russian Orthodox Church and belief in the Russian people

Another immediate fruit of his imprisonment experience was his remarkable House of the Dead that appeared in 1861 . Other novels followed which display a profound understanding of the depths of the human soul . Notes from the Underground of 1864 sets rational egoism which proffers reasons for treating others as instruments , against irrational selfishness which treats others as enemies . Crime and Punishment of 1866 , The Idiot of 1868 , and The Devils (also translated as The Possessed , written in 1871 ) led up to his great achievement , The Brothers Karamazov , completed in 1880 . With the Slavophils , Dostoevsky venerated the Orthodox Church , and was deeply impressed by Staretz Amvrosy whom he visited at Optina (Leatherbarrow , 169 ) But his sense of goodness was neither facile nor napve . He saw human freedom as something so awesome that most people are ready to relinquish it . This is epitomized in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor . In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature , Solzhenitsyn quoted Dostoevsky , `Beauty will save the world

The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky 's final novel , completed only two months before his death . It was intended as Dostoevsky 's apocalypse . Its genre might best be called Scripture , rather than novel or tragedy (Bloom , 5 ) This novel is the synthesis of Dostoevsky 's religious and philosophic search . The scene of the novel is laid in a sleepy province in the family of the noble , the Karamazovs . A sleepy province had always been for Russian the source of characters of integrity pure passion and spiritual relations among people . However , Dostoevsky presents the life in such province in different light . Spiritual decay had penetrated into patriarchal up-country

From the very early stages of the novel 's writing Dostoevsky underwent several influences . The first was the profound impact the Russian philosopher and thinker Nikolai Fyodorov had on Dostoevsky at this time of his life . According to Fyodorov 's doctrine Christianity is a system in which man...