In the Library
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 25 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett
- Original
- Original ru
- Chapters
- Chapters 96
- Length
- Length 349k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Brothers Karamazov
A book whose reputation as the great novel of God and doubt has buried the simpler truth that it is also a murder mystery and a roaring family quarrel, and it reads first of all as both of those.
The reputation arrives ahead of the book and tells you that The Brothers Karamazov is a philosophy seminar in disguise, eight hundred pages of arguments about whether God exists, the kind of thing you are supposed to come out of able to discuss rather than able to enjoy. That reputation has the emphasis exactly backwards. What is actually waiting for you is a lurid, gripping story about a poisonous old man and the three grown sons who have every reason in the world to want him dead, one of whom is going to be accused of killing him, and the long question of who really did it runs underneath the whole book like a current you can feel even in its quietest pages.
If you like this, try
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
The original murdered-father story that Dostoevsky spent a lifetime answering.
£1.99
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
Faulkner splinters one family across four voices the way Dostoevsky splits the soul across three brothers.
£1.99
The Trial
Franz Kafka
Kafka takes the Grand Inquisitor's logic and builds an entire world from it.
£1.99
About the book
Two brothers sit in a tavern on a freezing afternoon, and the younger one listens while the elder calmly takes the universe apart. Ivan does not deny that God exists. He simply returns his ticket to a creation whose final harmony is purchased with the tears of one tortured child, and asks how any heaven could be worth that price. It is the most devastating case against faith ever written, and Dostoevsky, dying as he worked, was brave enough to let it stand stronger than any answer he could give. Then he answers it anyway, not by refuting Ivan but through Alyosha, the gentle novice who meets the same darkness and keeps loving. Around them the story closes like a trap: their monstrous father murdered, the passionate Mitya in the dock for a crime that may not be his. Love in action, the book knows, is a harsh and dreadful thing beside love in dreams. You will finish it still arguing which brother was right, and you will never quite stop.