Extract

The soul is healed by being with children.

A father is murdered and the question of who killed him opens into the deepest interrogation of faith, freedom, and guilt in all of literature. Fyodor Dostoevsky published this final novel in 1880, pouring into the Karamazov family everything he had spent a lifetime thinking about: the sensual father, the passionate soldier, the intellectual atheist, the gentle novice, and the shadow-son whose resentment burns in silence. At its center stands the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan's poem about Christ returning to Seville only to be condemned by the church built in his name. Dostoevsky gave the devil the best arguments and answered not with logic but with a saint kissing the earth. The novel contains the whole of human possibility, terrible and radiant.