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The Brothers Karamazov was the last novel the fantastic Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky actually composed, and it has all the energy and passion of a person's last words. First appearing in serial form in 1879-80, it is generally considered one of the best novels ever written in any terminology. The storyline of the novel revolves around the murder of possibly one of the most despicable characters ever made, Fyodor Karamazov, the father of the Karamazov brothers.

This plot serves as the basic architecture for Dostoevsky's doctrine, touching on most of the Really Big Questions. Why do human beings need to endure? What is the character of human character? Are there limitations to human reason? Are we bound by ethical laws? How do we attain happiness?

Dostoevsky had planned The Brothers Karamazov as the primary part in a two-part novelistic job. From the time he began writing the novel, he was already a renowned author (think Crime and Punishment), whose opinions have been courted by aristocrats, politicians, and literati alike. (1862), the name of a powerful revolutionary novel written by a contemporary, Nikolai Chernychevsky.

Dostoevsky's tumultuous life gave his opinions a sort of jurisdiction that resonated with the disposition of Russia in the 1870s. As a young guy, he was compared to serfdom (basically slavery) and adopted socialism; he was even sentenced to Siberia from the early 1850s because of his part at the Petrashevsky circle, a revolutionary organization. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 failed to usher in a new age of equality and overall wealth, as many on both the left and the right had expected. As the gap widened between the rich and the weak, the post-emancipation period was a volatile time that witnessed the arrival of revolutionary organizations that resorted to terrorism.

As a former revolutionary himself, Dostoevsky was sympathetic to the humanistic and innovative goals of the revolutionaries, but doubtful of their approaches. In contrast to the revolutionaries, who had been affected by Western European thinkers (such as Karl Marx), Dostoevsky hunted to envision humanistic ideals such as social justice at a conservative, Russian idiom that adopted the Russian Orthodox faith (origin).

However, his novels have had a deep impact on several authors and thinkers, from Franz Kafkato Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud to Albert Einstein (origin).

In his preface, Dostoevsky informs us that the second part of the novel would monitor the rest of Alyosha's life. His notes suggest that this second part was to demonstrate how Alyosha becomes a new kind of revolutionary who embodies Dostoevsky's world perspective, a young revolutionary who'd talk to the young radicals of the time. Regardless of the fact that the second part was never composed, The Brothers Karamazov continues to hold readers' imaginations as a massive accomplishment on its own.

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