Dostoyevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, the year before his death. The novel centers on three brothers: Dmitri, passionate and reckless, in constant conflict with their depraved father Fyodor; Ivan, an atheist intellectual whose arguments against theodicy form the philosophical core of the book; and Alyosha, a novice monk whose faith the novel tests without destroying. When Fyodor Karamazov is found murdered, suspicion falls on Dmitri, whose public quarrels with his father and desperate need for money provide motive enough for the town. The trial in the novel's final section is one of the most detailed and psychologically acute legal scenes in nineteenth-century fiction.
Ivan's chapter "The Grand Inquisitor" is the intellectual summit of the novel. In it, Jesus returns to sixteenth-century Seville and is arrested by the Inquisitor, who explains that humanity cannot bear the burden of the freedom Christ offered. The Inquisitor is not a villain in his own understanding; he believes he is serving human need more honestly than Christ did. Ivan presents this as evidence that a God who creates sentient beings and permits them to suffer is not defensible on moral grounds. Alyosha's response is not a counterargument but an embrace, the gesture of a man who understands that rational refutation is not what Ivan needs and not what the question allows.
Ivan's challenge to theodicy, why does God permit the suffering of children, and what metaphysical harmony could ever justify it, has made the book required reading in philosophy departments as well as literature courses. But the novel is not only a philosophical document. The relationship between Dmitri and Grushenka, the murderous resentment that structures the Karamazov family, and the courtroom drama in which an innocent man's passion condemns him more effectively than any evidence, these belong to Dostoyevsky's finest novelistic work. The ending, where Alyosha speaks to schoolchildren at a graveside, suggests that what survives ideology and catastrophe is something much simpler and harder to argue against.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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