THE FOLIO SOCIETY

‘To find the man in man . . .’ Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘I depict all the depths of the human soul’. Revered as one of the true landmark achievements in world literature, Dostoyevsky’s final novel – completed in 1880, just three months before his death – is also his most morally complex and emotionally intense. Because no other novel had combined social realism with such psychological insight, its impact on the modern sensibility was huge: a copy was found on Tolstoy’s bedside table when he died, and Sigmund Freud, fascinated by its exploration of Oedipal themes, described it as ‘the most magnificent novel ever written’.

The Brothers Karamazov is a multilayered story of retribution and justice. Its focus is the brutal murder of a disreputable landowner and the varying degrees of culpability of his sons – Dmitri, a dissolute army officer; Ivan, a writer and rationalist; Alyosha, a religious novice; and Smerdyakov, their despised illegitimate half-brother. As the novel builds towards Dmitri’s trial and its protagonists debate the existence of God and man’s responsibility for his own actions, Dostoyevsky clinically dissects their complicity.

Chosen by Hew Strachan
‘The Brothers Karamazov is one of that select band of books which every civilised human being should read every ten years. That is not just because it is a great work but because it is a mirror on our own existential dilemmas. As we move from adolescence to senectitude, we confront the same fundamental dilemmas, but with different responses. Reading The Brothers is therefore a test of our growth and development, a method of re-engaging with the fundamentals of faith, reason and above all agnosticism’

Historian Hew Strachan is one of the foremost experts on the First World War. His ongoing 3-volume history looks set to become the most comprehensive and widely respected academic reference work on the subject.