The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Karamazov, a coarse and greedy provincial landowner, has three sons who hardly know him: Dmitri, a passionate army officer who quarrels with his father over money and over the same woman, Grushenka; Ivan, a brilliant intellectual who cannot accept a God who allows children to suffer; and Alyosha, the youngest, a novice in the local monastery under the wise elder Zosima. A fourth, probably illegitimate son, Smerdyakov, serves in the house. When the old man is murdered, Dmitri is arrested, and the investigation and trial lead each brother to face what he believes and what he is responsible for.

Dostoevsky's last novel appeared in 1879 and 1880, and he died a few months after finishing it. Ivan's tale of 'The Grand Inquisitor', in which Christ returns to Seville during the Inquisition, is one of the most discussed passages in all literature, and Freud called the book the most magnificent novel ever written. This translation, of 1912, is by Constance Garnett. Begin, if you prefer a shorter path, with Crime and Punishment.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death in 1849 for his part in a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to hard labour in Siberia, which he described in The House of the Dead.

His great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, turn questions of guilt, faith and freedom into stories; White Nights is a gentle place to start.