Essays on the Brothers Karamazov

In his essay, “The Brothers Karamazov: Idea and Technique” Edward Wasiolek examines two aspects of Dostoevsky’s work. He begins with an exposition of the scene in Elder Zosima’s cell and Ivan’s internal struggles with religion, and then follows this with a detailed look at the...

One of the major themes of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is the concept of justice, both earthly and divine. Dostoevsky investigates the differences between the two forms and examines several aspects of justice. The novel introduces several different philosophies on justice and shows what...

Often, authors develop a central idea in a novel by presenting it repeatedly in differing forms throughout the work. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is a perfect example of this technique. Specifically, over the course of the work Dostoevsky speculates about the nature of...

“You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate questions!”(said to Ivan by “The Devil”, 776) Through Ivan, Dostoevsky...

Nature of Crime in The Brothers Karamazov The central act in The Brothers Karamazov is the murder of father Fyodor Karamazov. As such, the novel could be thought of as a crime story, the purpose of which is to find out who committed the heinous...

Reading a Dostoevsky book doesn’t give us any insight into the mind of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky almost never makes a blanket statement in his books, and, in general, very few opinions voiced by characters in his novels can be traced back to the author himself....

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, exaggerates the extremes of Russia, saying that “[Russians] need continually…two extremes at the same moment, or they are miserable and dissatisfied and their existence is incomplete. They are wide, wide as mother Russia.” In many of his works, Dostoyevsky’s...

When reading a book as brilliant as The Brother’s Karamazov, one wonders where Dostoevsky’s inspiration came from. According to Sigmund Freud, the novel must not be studied as a fiction but as a science, that being psychology. It seems that the innermost thoughts of Dostoevsky...