Dmitri
The passionate son, always almost innocent, always almost guilty.
Realism & Victorian · Novel · 1880
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A father is killed in a provincial town. Each son inherits a piece of the crime: intellect, appetite, faith. The Grand Inquisitor and the weeping of a child are made to share a book.
Philosophical murder story
Characters
Ivan
The intellect that returns the ticket; author of a poem that judges God.
Alyosha
The novice whose faith has to walk through the family’s wreckage.
Fyodor Pavlovich
The father as farce and wound: buffoonery with teeth.
Themes
Freedom and theodicy
If God, why the child? If no God, why not the crime?
Brother and brother
Three answers to the same blood.
Motifs
Where truth is performed and missed.
Grushenka’s fable: one small mercy as a rope out of hell.
The father’s murder as the family’s open question.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.