Dostoyevsky was the son of an impoverished nobleman of Lithuanian origin. born in 1821 in Moscow, where his father held the post of resident doctor at a charity hospital. The family had small living quarters on the hospital grounds, and Fyodor became acquainted at an early age with misery, misfortune and death. Doctor Dostoyevsky, authoritarian and morose, believed in old fashioned discipline and strict religious upbringing, and Fyodor's childhood...

"The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the "wicked and sentimental" Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons--the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, its social and spiritual...

The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between the outsized Fyodor Karamazov and his three very different sons. It is above all the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature.