The Brothers Karamazov

In a small Russian town, the dissolute Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons, the sensual Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan and the saintly novice Alyosha, are drawn toward the old man's murder and the questions of faith, doubt and guilt that surround it. Dostoevsky's fictional Skotoprigonyevsk is drawn from Staraya Russa, where he wrote the novel: the family house, the monastery of the Elder Zosima, the taverns of Dmitri's ruin, and the courtroom of the trial that closes the book.

Fyodor

The Karamazov house

The father

In the town house of the vicious, buffoonish Fyodor Karamazov gather his three sons, each at war with him and with one another over money, over the woman Grushenka, over God himself. Dostoevsky sets the family drama in a provincial Russian town drawn from his own Staraya Russa, a small world made large enough to hold the novel's vast argument about faith and evil.

The opening

inspired by The Karamazov family house stands in the fictional town of Skotoprigonyevsk, drawn from Staraya Russa where Dostoevsky lived and wrote; sited there.

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