Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
The Brothers Karamazov
If there is no God, is everything permitted? – with the legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
Introduction
Dostoevsky’s last novel appeared in instalments in the Russian Messenger in 1879–80; he died in early 1881, a few months after finishing it, and a planned sequel was never written. The plot turns on the murder of the dissolute Fyodor Karamazov and on his sons: the passionate Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan, the novice Alyosha, and the servant Smerdyakov, who is probably his illegitimate son. In the chapter “Rebellion” Ivan rejects a world order built on the suffering of children, before telling Alyosha his poem of the Grand Inquisitor. The novel’s answer lies less in counter-arguments than in figures such as the elder Zosima. Freud, Camus and Wittgenstein were among its admiring readers.
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Connections
Taken up in
- Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art1929 · Mikhail Bakhtin
- The Myth of Sisyphus1942 · Albert Camus
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