The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Contents
The Brothers Karamazov
PART I
Book I The History of a Family
Chapter 1 Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov
Chapter 2 He Gets Rid of His Eldest Son
Chapter 3 The Second Marriage and the Second Family
Chapter 4 The Third Son, Alyosha
Chapter 5 Elders
Book II An Unfortunate Gathering
Chapter 1 They Arrive at the Monastery
Chapter 2 The Old Buffoon
Chapter 3 Peasant Women Who Have Faith
Chapter 4 A Lady of Little Faith
Chapter 5 So Be It! So Be It!
Chapter 6 Why Is Such a Man Alive?
Chapter 7 A Young Man Bent on a Career
Chapter 8 The Scandalous Scene
Book III The Sensualists
Chapter 1 In the Servants’ Quarters
Chapter 2 Lizaveta
Chapter 3 The Confession of a Passionate Heart — in Verse
Chapter 4 The Confession of a Passionate Heart — In Anecdote
Chapter 5 The Confession of a Passionate Heart — Heels Up
Chapter 6 Smerdyakov
Chapter 7 The Controversy
Chapter 8 Over the Brandy
Chapter 9 The Sensualists
Chapter 10 Both Together
Chapter 11 Another Reputation Ruined
PART II
Book IV Lacerations
Chapter 1 Father Ferapont
Chapter 2 At His Father’s
Chapter 3 A Meeting with the Schoolboys
Chapter 4 At the Hohlakovs’
Chapter 5 A Laceration in the Drawing-Room
Chapter 6 A Laceration in the Cottage
Chapter 7 And in the Open Air
Book V Pro and Contra
Chapter 1 The Engagement
Chapter 2 Smerdyakov with a Guitar
Chapter 3 The Brothers Make Friends
Chapter 4 Rebellion
Chapter 5 The Grand Inquisitor
Chapter 6 For Awhile a Very Obscure One
Chapter 7 It’s Always Worth While Speaking to a Clever Man
Book VI The Russian Monk
Chapter 1 Father Zossima and His Visitors
Chapter 2 Recollections of Father Zossima’s Youth before he became a Monk. The Duel
Chapter 3 Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zossima. The Russian Monk and his possible Significance
PART III
Book VII Alyosha
Chapter 1 The Breath of Corruption
Chapter 2 A Critical Moment
Chapter 3 An Onion
Chapter 4 Cana of Galilee
Book VIII Mitya
Chapter 1 Kuzma Samsonov
Chapter 2 Lyagavy
Chapter 3 Gold Mines
Chapter 4 In the Dark
Chapter 5 A Sudden Resolution
Chapter 6 I Am Coming, Too!
Chapter 7 The First and Rightful Lover
Chapter 8 Delirium
Book IX The Preliminary Investigation
Chapter 1 The Beginning of Perhotin’s Official Career
Chapter 2 The Alarm
Chapter 3 The Sufferings of a Soul
Chapter 4 The Second Ordeal
Chapter 5 The Third Ordeal
Chapter 6 The Prosecutor Catches Mitya
Chapter 7 Mitya’s Great Secret Received with Hisses
Chapter 8 The Evidences of the Witnesses. The Babe
Chapter 9 They Carry Mitya Away
PART IV
Book X The Boys
Chapter 1 Kolya Krassotkin
Chapter 2 Children
Chapter 3 The Schoolboy
Chapter 4 The Lost Dog
Chapter 5 By Ilusha’s Bedside
Chapter 6 Precocity
Chapter 7 Ilusha
Book XI Ivan
Chapter 1 At Grushenka’s
Chapter 2 The Injured Foot
Chapter 3 A Little Demon
Chapter 4 A Hymn and a Secret
Chapter 5 Not You, Not You!
Chapter 6 The First Interview with Smerdyakov
Chapter 7 The Second Visit to Smerdyakov
Chapter 8 The Third and Last Interview with Smerdyakov
Chapter 9 The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare
Chapter 10 It Was He Who Said That
Book XII A Judicial Error
Chapter 1 The Fatal Day
Chapter 2 Dangerous Witnesses
Chapter 3 The Medical Experts and a Pound of Nuts
Chapter 4 Fortune Smiles on Mitya
Chapter 5 A Sudden Catastrophe
Chapter 6 The Prosecutor’s Speech. Sketches of Character
Chapter 7 An Historical Survey
Chapter 8 A Treatise on Smerdyakov
Chapter 9 The Galloping Troika. The End of the Prosecutor’s Speech
Chapter 10 The Speech for the Defence. An Argument that Cuts Both Ways
Chapter 11 There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery
Chapter 12 And There Was No Murder Either
Chapter 13 A Corrupter of Thought
Chapter 14 The Peasants Stand Firm
EPILOGUE
Chapter 1 Plans for Mitya’s Escape
Chapter 2 For a Moment the Lie Becomes Truth
Chapter 3 Ilusha’s Funeral. The Speech at the Stone
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoyevsky’s final novel was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger in 1880. The Brothers Karamazov tells the story of a patricide, in which each of the murdered man’s sons share a varying degree of complicity.
The novel is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt and reason, offering a complex narrative steeped with ethical debates of God, free will and morality. Since its first publication, the novel has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements of nineteenth century Russian literature. Dostoyevsky intended The Brothers Karamazov to be the first part in an epic story titled The Life of a Great Sinner, but he died less than four months after the publication.
In the October 1877, A Writer’s Diary article by Dostoyevsky mentioned a “literary work that has imperceptibly and involuntarily been taken shape within me over these two years of publishing the Diary”. His Diary, a collection of numerous articles, had included similar themes which The Brothers Karamazov would later borrow from. These include parricide, law and order and social problems.
Though Dostoyevsky was influenced by religion and philosophy in his life, a personal tragedy altered the course of his last novel. In May 1878, Dostoyevsky’s three-year-old son Alyosha died of epilepsy, which condition he had inherited from his father. The novelist’s grief is apparent throughout the book. Dostoyevsky named the hero after his deceased son, as well as imbuing him with qualities that he most admired. The author’s sense of loss is also reflected in the story of Captain Snegiryov and his young son Ilyusha.
The novel presents Fyodor Karamazov as the father and eventual victim of patricide. Fyodor is a 55-year-old buffoon and drunkard, with three sons from two marriages. He is rumoured to have fathered an illegitimate son, Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov, whom he employs as his servant. Fyodor takes no interest in any of his sons, who are, as a result, raised apart from each other and their father. The relationship between Fyodor and his adult sons drives much of the plot.
The first book introduces the Karamazov family and relates the story of their distant and recent past.
The details of Fyodor’s two marriages as well as his indifference to the upbringing of his three children is chronicled. The narrator also establishes the widely varying personalities of the three brothers and the circumstances that have led to their return to Fyodor’s town. The first book concludes by describing the mysterious religious order of Elders to which the younger son Alyosha has become devoted.
The Brothers Karamazov has had an enormous influence on many writers and philosophers across the world. Admirers of the novel include Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut. Franz Kafka felt immensely indebted to Dostoyevsky and The Brothers Karamazov for influencing his own work. Kafka called himself and Dostoyevsky “blood relatives”, perhaps because of Dostoyevsky’s existential style. Sigmund Freud went so far as to call The Brothers Karamazov “the most magnificent novel ever written” and was fascinated with its Oedipal themes. In 1928 Freud published a paper titled “Dostoevsky and Parricide” in which he investigated Dostoyevsky’s own neuroses. Freud claimed that Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy was not a natural condition, but instead a physical manifestation of the author’s hidden guilt over his father’s death.
According to Freud, Dostoyevsky (and all other sons) wished for the death of his father because of latent desire for his mother; and as evidence Freud cites the fact that Dostoyevsky’s epileptic fits did not begin until he turned 18, the year his father died. However, some scholars have since discredited Freud’s claim due to the evidence that Dostoyevsky’s children inherited his epileptic condition, making the cause biological, rather than psychological.
The Brothers Karamazov
PART I
BOOK I THE HISTORY OF A FAMILY
Chapter 1 Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov
ALEXEY Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner” — for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate — was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men’s tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity — the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough — but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.
He was married twice, and had three sons, the eldest, Dmitri, by his first wife, and two, Ivan and Alexey, by his second. Fyodor Pavlovitch’s first wife, Adelaida Ivanovna, belonged to a fairly rich and distinguished noble family, also landowners in our district, the Miusovs. How it came to pass that an heiress, who was also a beauty, and moreover one of those vigorous intelligent girls, so common in this generation, but sometimes also to be found in the last, could have married such a worthless, puny weakling, as we all called him, I won’t attempt to explain.
I knew a young lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of an enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Indeed, if this precipice, a chosen and favourite
