Fyodor Dostoyevsky's powerful meditation on faith meaning and morality The Brothers Karamazov
is translated with an introduction and notes by David McDuff in Penguin Classics. When brutal
landowner Fyodor Karamazov is murdered the lives of his sons are changed irrevocably: Mitya
the sensualist whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for
parricide Ivan the intellectual whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown the spiritual
Alyosha who tries to heal the family's rifts and the shadowy figure of their bastard
half-brother Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the
murderer Dostoyevsky's dark masterpiece evokes a world where the lines between innocence and
corruption good and evil blur and everyone's faith in humanity is tested. This powerful
translation of The Brothers Karamazov features and introduction highlighting Dostoyevsky's
recurrent themes of guilt and salvation with a new chronology and further reading. Fyodor
Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) was born in Moscow. From 1849-54 he lived in a convict
prison and in later years his passion for gambling led him deeply into debt. His other works
available in Penguin Classics include Crime & Punishment The Idiot and Demons. If you enjoyed
The Brothers Karamazov you might like Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls also available in Penguin
Classics. 'There 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' Joyce Carol Oates 'Dostoyevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to
learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life' Friedrich Nietzsche 'The most
magnificent novel ever written' Sigmund Freud