The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's last novel, serialised in 1879–80, is a murder story that becomes an argument about God, freedom and responsibility. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a greedy and dissolute landowner, has three sons: Dmitri, a passionate former army officer quarrelling with him over money and a woman, Grushenka; Ivan, a brilliant intellectual and sceptic; and Alyosha, a novice in the local monastery under the elder Zosima. The servant Smerdyakov is rumoured to be a fourth, illegitimate son. When the father is murdered, suspicion falls on Dmitri. The philosophical centre is Book Five, where Ivan tells Alyosha he cannot accept a world in which innocent children suffer, and then recites his prose poem "The Grand Inquisitor", in which Christ returns to Seville and is arrested by a cardinal who claims that people want bread and "miracle, mystery and authority" rather than freedom. Book Six answers with Zosima's teaching of active love and of each person's responsibility for all.

It contains the most powerful statement of the problem of evil in literature, and it sets faith and doubt against each other with full force on both sides.