The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky. *The Brothers Karamazov. (1880, Russia)
#novel #realism #Russia #19thcentury
Key Terms (tags)

 

GENRE novel
TIME PERIOD 19th century
THE MODERN WORLD
LITERARY FORM
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

Place on List:

II. Literary Genre: The Novel

1. What is the novel?

Fyodor Dostoevsky. *The Brothers Karamazov. (1880, Russia)

Supporting References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov
2. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28054
3. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~karamazov/resources/?page_id=400

4. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/

5. Binyon, T. J. "Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich." The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. : Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference. 2005. Date Accessed 15 Aug. 2013 .

The article offers an overview of Dostoyevsky and less a discussion on the above-cited text.

“Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich (1821–1881), Russian novelist and journalist. He entered the army as an engineer but resigned in 1844 to write. Sentenced to death in 1849 as one of a utopian socialist circle but reprieved immediately before execution, he was exiled to Siberia until 1859, spending 1850–54 in prison, of which Notes from the House of the Dead (1862; Zapiski iz myortvogo doma) gives a fictionalized account. Though his four great novels—Crime and Punishment (1866; Prestupleniye i nakazaniye), The Idiot (1868; Idiot), The Possessed (1872; Besy), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880; Brat'ya Karamazovy)—all deal with murder, Dostoyevsky is not primarily interested in the detection of the crime or the psychology of the criminal. He sees murder as the result of the infection of society by Western ideas encouraging the selfish assertion of the individual will. In opposition to this he puts forward a Russian ideal of self-sacrifice and, in The Brothers Karamazov, the doctrine that all are guilty for the sins of all, in later journalism proclaiming Russia's messianic mission to save Europe. Dostoyevsky had a profound influence on subsequent Russian literature and thought. In the West he has been in the twentieth century the most widely read and influential of all Russian authors, as can be seen in the work, for example, of Albert Camus, André Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, despite his remark, “I am called a psychologist; it is untrue, I am merely a realist in the highest sense of the word,” he has been more generally viewed as a master of psychological narrative (Freud, “Dostoyevsky and Parricide,” 1928). The crime novel, from R. L. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) onward, owes much to him: Most portrayals of lonely, obsessed murderers can be traced back to that of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.”