Karamazov Brothers

"Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers
(1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate
philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich
Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan,
the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at
some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is
Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the
existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective
nature of guilt, the disatrous consequences of rationalism. The
novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal
system, and even the authors most cherisehd causes and beliefs are
presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy, and
radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong
are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it ""the
allegory for the world's maturity"", but with children to the fore.
This new translation does full justice to Doestoevsky's genius,
particularly in the use of the spoken word, which ranges over every
mode of human expression."