The Brothers Karamazov (Everyman's Library)
Dostoevsky's towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues, brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, and instinctive theatricality that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, which chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between the outsized Fyodor Karamazov and his three very different sons. It is above all the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity, and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature.
This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is the definitive version in English, which magnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevsky's masterpiece.