The Brothers Karamazov is the final novel by the Russian author
Fyodor Dostoevsky, and is generally considered the culmination of his
life's work. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers
Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger and
completed in November 1880. Dostoevsky intended it to be the first part
in an epic story titled The Life of a Great Sinner, but he died less
than four months after its publication.
The book portrays a
parricide in which each of the murdered man's sons share a varying
degree of complicity. On a deeper level, it is a spiritual drama of
moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, reason, free will and modern
Russia. Dostoevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which is
also the main setting of the novel.