The last and greatest work by the nineteenth-century Russian writer and philosopher: âThe most magnificent novel ever writtenâ (Sigmund Freud).
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â[The Brothers Karamazov] is a philosophical novel, a family drama, a murder mystery, and a love story. Itâs also an immortal masterpiece.
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âThe ferocious, idiosyncratic vitality of Dostoyevskyâs fiction captures readers again and again. So do his indelible characters.
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âFrom the novelâs earliest scenes introducing the Karamazovsâthe brothers and their drunken, obnoxious fatherâDostoyevsky acknowledges that ideas canât exist without people and that people are the true subject of any novel. Those scenes are both a searching debate about faith and virtue and a sequence thatâs recognizable to anyone who has ever spent the holidays with [a] collection of family members ranging from the endearing to the intolerable. It is also, if you ignore Dostoyevskyâs reputation for seriousness, very funny . . . If Ivanâs existential confusion doesnât speak to you, the Karamazovsâ complicated love lives, both sordid and transcendent, never fail to fascinate. Their problems, however grounded in their particular moment in Russian history, seem only a hairâs breadth away from our own. How powerful is love? Hate? Blood? Money? Faith? What makes this great novel immortal is not its answers but its questions, questions we continue to ask ourselves, decades after the world that forged The Brothers Karamazov has passed away.â âLaura Miller, Slate
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âThere is no writer who better demonstrates the contradictions and fluctuations of the creative mind than Dostoyevsky, and nowhere more astonishingly than in The Brothers Karamazov.â âJoyce Carol Oates