The Brothers Karamazov

The novel begins with the inscription from the Fourth Gospel stating: "Unless a corn of wheat falleth into the ground and dieth, it abideth alone. But if it dieth, it bringeth forth the mighty harvest."
Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a wealthy and dissolute landowner in a Russian provincial town, has neglected all three of his sons. Dmitri, the eldest, is an impulsive former army officer who has returned to press a claim on his late mother’s inheritance, which he believes his father is withholding. Ivan, the second son, is an intellectual and religious sceptic. Alyosha, the youngest, is a novice at the local monastery under the elder Zosima. The household also includes the servant Smerdyakov, an epileptic widely rumoured to be Fyodor Pavlovich’s illegitimate son.
Dmitri and his father are further set against each other by their rivalry for Grushenka, a young woman of local notoriety. Dmitri is meanwhile engaged to Katerina Ivanovna, to whom he owes three thousand rubles he has already spent. A meeting at the monastery, arranged so that Zosima might mediate the inheritance dispute, collapses into scandal through Fyodor Pavlovich’s deliberate buffoonery, and Dmitri later assaults his father in his own house, threatening to return and kill him.
Over the following days Ivan explains to Alyosha his rejection of a divinely created world founded on the suffering of children, and recites to him his prose poem “The Grand Inquisitor,” in which a cardinal of the Spanish Inquisition arrests a returned Christ and accuses him of having burdened humanity with free will. Zosima dies shortly afterwards. His body decomposes rapidly, contrary to the expectation that a holy man’s remains resist corruption, and the resulting scandal precipitates a crisis of faith in Alyosha, from which he emerges renewed.
Desperate to repay Katerina Ivanovna before leaving with Grushenka, Dmitri fails to raise the money and goes at night to his father’s house carrying a brass pestle. The narration breaks off at the window. Dmitri is next seen fleeing the property, striking the servant Grigory with the pestle when the old man tries to stop him. Learning that Grushenka has gone to a nearby village to meet a former lover, Dmitri follows her there, spends lavishly on a night of revelry, and wins from her a declaration of love, at the end of which the police arrive and arrest him for his father’s murder and the theft of three thousand roubles.
Dmitri maintains his innocence throughout the investigation. He explains that the money he spent that night was the remaining half of Katerina Ivanovna’s three thousand roubles, which he had sewn into a cloth and carried for weeks; the investigators do not believe him, and the circumstantial evidence against him is overwhelming, since the only other person in the house was Smerdyakov, apparently incapacitated by a seizure.
Ivan visits Smerdyakov three times. At the last of these Smerdyakov confesses that he feigned the seizure, killed Fyodor Pavlovich and took the money, and insists that Ivan was complicit, both by absenting himself from the house and by teaching Smerdyakov that in the absence of God everything is permitted. Ivan, already feverish, suffers a hallucination in which the devil appears to him as a shabby gentleman. Alyosha interrupts it with the news that Smerdyakov has hanged himself.
At the trial Ivan’s account of the confession is dismissed as delirium, and Katerina Ivanovna, distraught at his condition, produces a letter in which Dmitri had drunkenly written that he would kill his father. Dmitri is convicted and sentenced to twenty years of hard labour in Siberia.
A parallel narrative follows Alyosha’s friendship with a group of schoolboys and with Ilyusha, the consumptive son of a captain whom Dmitri had publicly humiliated. In the epilogue Ivan and Katerina Ivanovna plan Dmitri’s escape to America, Dmitri and Katerina Ivanovna are reconciled, and the novel closes at Ilyusha’s funeral, where Alyosha urges the boys to keep the memory of their friend and of that moment alive.