Fyodor Karamazov is a rich and dissolute man who has fathered three legitimate sons in two marriages and is rumored also to be the father of Smerdyakov, the mean-spirited and malicious epileptic who works as a servant in the Karamazov household. Each of the brothers represents a different way of approaching life and its meaning (or lack of it). The eldest, Dmitri, is a sensualist like his father, interested only in the pleasures of the flesh. Ivan is a rationalist and atheist, unable to reconcile the idea of a supreme being with the suffering he sees in the world, who seems to be permanently angry with the God in whom he doesn't believe. Alyosha is a kind and gentle man, as fervent in his Christian beliefs as Ivan is in his atheism, who is attached to a monastery where he studies at the feet of a saintly elder named Zosima. In the course of the novel, Dmitri and his father come into conflict, both over money and over a beautiful young woman named Grushenka. The two men come to blows and Dmitri is heard to threaten his father so, when Fyodor is found dead, suspicion falls on his eldest son and he is brought to trial. The truth about Fyodor's murder, which never fully emerges, is that he was killed by Smerdyakov, who has listened to Ivan's tirades against God and come to believe that there is no right and no wrong in the world. In death, as in life, the brutal Fyodor exercises his power over all his sons and only Alyosha, with his belief in the power of love to conquer suffering, survives undamaged. Dostoevsky's enormously ambitious novel grapples with the most profound questions of good and evil and the meaning of life, while remaining a darkly gripping saga of one family's disintegration and near-destruction.

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