Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov

"Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner 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 Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His best-selling novel "The Brothers Karamazov" is a passionate philosophical work set in 19th-century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. "The Brothers Karamazov" was first published as a serial from 1879 to 1880.