<p>In his youth, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is a coarse, vulgar man whose main concerns are making money and seducing young women. He marries twice and has three sons: Dmitri, the child of his first wife, and Ivan and Alyosha, children of his second wife. Fyodor Pavlovich never has any interest in his sons, and when their mothers die, he sends them away to be brought up by relatives and friends. At the beginning of the novel, Dmitri Karamazov, who is now a twenty-eight-year-old soldier, has just returned to Fyodor Pavlovich’s town. Fyodor Pavlovich is unhappy to see Dmitri because Dmitri has come to claim an inheritance left to him by his mother. Fyodor Pavlovich plans to keep the inheritance for himself. The two men swiftly fall into conflict over the money, and the coldly intellectual Ivan, who knows neither his father nor his brother well, is eventually called in to help settle their dispute. The kind, faithful Alyosha, who is about twenty, also lives in the town, where he is an acolyte, or apprentice, at the monastery, studying with the renowned elder Zosima. Eventually Dmitri and Fyodor Pavlovich agree that perhaps Zosima could help resolve the Karamazovs’ quarrel, and Alyosha tentatively consents to arrange a meeting.</p>

The Brothers Karamazov

Literature & Fiction

Dostoyevsky, Mr Fyodor

History & Criticism

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

<p>The anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground is a bitter, misanthropic man living alone in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s. He is a veteran of the Russian civil service who has recently been able to retire because he has inherited some money. The novel consists of the “notes” that the man writes, a confused and often contradictory set of memoirs or confessions describing and explaining his alienation from modern society. Notes from Underground is divided into two sections. The first, “Underground,” is shorter and set in the 1860s, when the Underground Man is forty years old. This section serves as an introduction to the character of the Underground Man, explaining his theories about his antagonistic position toward society. The second fragment of Notes from Underground, entitled “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” describes specific events in the Underground Man’s life in the 1840s, when he was twenty-four years old. In a sense, this section serves as a practical illustration of the more abstract ideas the Underground Man sets forth in the first section. This second section reveals the narrator’s progression from his youthful perspective, influenced by Romanticism and ideals of “the beautiful and lofty,” to his mature perspective in 1860, which is purely cynical about beauty, loftiness, and literariness in general.</p>

Notes From The Underground

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows. Some of the passengers by this particular train were returning from abroad; but the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, picked up at the different stations nearer town. All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions generally appeared to have taken on the colour of the fog outside.

The Idiot

Humor & Satire

The following is an extract from M. Dostoevsky's celebrated novel, The Brothers Karamazof, the last publication from the pen of the great Russian novelist, who died a few months ago, just as the concluding chapters appeared in print. Dostoevsky is beginning to be recognized as one of the ablest and profoundest among Russian writers. His characters are invariably typical portraits drawn from various classes of Russian society, strikingly life-like and realistic to the highest degree. The following extract is a cutting satire on modern theology generally and the Roman Catholic religion in particular. The idea is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of the Inquisition, and is at once arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor. One of the three brothers of the story, Ivan, a rank materialist and an atheist of the new school, is supposed to throw this conception into the form of a poem, which he describes to Alyosha—the youngest of the brothers, a young Christian mystic brought up by a "saint" in a monastery—as follows: (—Ed. Theosophist, Nov., 1881)

The Grand Inquisitor

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Books by Dostoyevsky, Mr Fyodor

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dostoyevsky, Mr Fyodor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Brothers Karamazov

Notes From The Underground

The Idiot

The Grand Inquisitor