The Brothers Karamazov

The award-winning translation of Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow on October 30, 1821. He was educated in Moscow and at the School of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg, where he spent four years. In 1844 he resigned his Commission in the army to devote himself to literature. In 1846, he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk; it was an immediate critical and popular success. This was followed by short stories and a novel, The Double. While at work on Netochka Nezvanova, the twenty-nine-year-old author was arrested for belonging to a young socialist group. He was tried and condemned to death, but at the last moment his sentence was commuted to prison in Siberia. He spent four years in the penal settlement at Omsk; then he was released on the condition that he serve in the army. While in the army he fell in love with and married Marie Isaeva. In 1859 he was granted full amnesty and allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In the next few years he wrote his first full-length novels: The Friend of the Family (1859) and The Insulted and the Injured (1862). Notes from Underground (1864) was in many ways his most influential work of this period, containing the wellsprings of his mature philosophy: the hope of gaining salvation through degradation and suffering. At the end of this literary period, his wife died. Plagued by epilepsy, faced with financial ruin, he worked at superhuman speed to produce The Gambler, dictating the novel to eighteen-year-old Anna Grigorievna Snitkina. The manuscript was delivered to his publisher in time. During the next fourteen years, Dostoyevsky wrote his greatest works: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. The latter book was published a year before his death on January 28, 1881.