Fyodor Dostoyevsky's powerful meditation on faith, meaning and morality,
The Brothers Karamazov is translated with an introduction and notes by
David McDuff in Penguin Classics. When brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov
is murdered, the lives of his sons are changed irrevocably: Mitya, the
sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him
under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, whose mental
tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to
heal the family's rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard
half-brother Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal
the true identity of the murderer, Dostoyevsky's dark masterpiece evokes
a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil,
blur and everyone's faith in humanity is tested. This powerful
translation of The Brothers Karamazov features and introduction
highlighting Dostoyevsky's recurrent themes of guilt and salvation, with
a new chronology and further reading. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky
(1821-1881) was born in Moscow. From 1849-54 he lived in a convict
prison, and in later years his passion for gambling led him deeply into
debt. His other works available in Penguin Classics include Crime &
Punishment, The Idiot and Demons. If you enjoyed The Brothers Karamazov
you might like Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, also available in Penguin
Classics. 'There is no writer who better demonstrates the contradictions
and fluctuations of the creative mind than Dostoyevsky, and nowhere more
astonishingly than in The Brothers Karamazov' Joyce Carol Oates
'Dostoyevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to
learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life' Friedrich
Nietzsche 'The most magnificent novel ever written' Sigmund Freud
