Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (November 11 [O.S. October 30] 1821–February 9 [O.S. January 28] 1881) was a Russian novelist and writer of fiction whose works, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, have had a profound and lasting effect on intellectual thought and world literature.

Dostoevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was named by Walter Kaufmann as the "best overture for existentialism ever written."[2]

The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы in Russian, /'bratʲjə karə'mazəvɨ/) is the last novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, generally considered the culmination of his life's work. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger and completed in November of 1880. Dostoevsky intended it to be the first part in an epic story titled The Life of a Great Sinner,[1] but he died less than four months after publication.

The book is written on two levels: on the surface it is the story of a parricide in which all of a murdered man's sons share varying degrees of complicity but, on a deeper level, it is a spiritual drama of the moral struggles between faith, doubt, reason, and free will. The novel was composed mostly in Staraya Russa, which is also the main setting of the book.

Since its publication, it has been acclaimed all over the world by thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud[2] and Albert Einstein[3] as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.