The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dostoevsky's high reputation as one of a handful of thinkers who shaped modern sentimentality sometimes obscured purely novelist virtues — brilliant features, a knack for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality — which made his work so popular in nineteenth-century Russia. His last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, The Brothers Karamazov tells the story of the fierce love-hate struggle between the clever Fyodor Karamazov and his three different sons. This is primarily a murder story told with intellectual openness and a sense of the human condition unparalleled in world literature.
