The Brothers Karamazov
Four sons and a father nobody mourns. Freud wrote on it as the parricide every son has already committed in wish.
The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written
Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a dissolute landowner, sets his sons against him and against one another over money and a woman. The sensualist Dmitri, the sceptic Ivan, and the novice Alyosha each carry the family temper differently, while the servant Smerdyakov keeps to the edge of the house. When the father is killed, suspicion falls on the son who quarrelled with him most openly, and the trial turns on the distance between who wished the death and who struck the blow.
Freud built his essay Dostoevsky and Parricide on this design, reading the murder as an act the epileptic Smerdyakov carries out while the moral weight settles on every brother who wanted it. For a clinician the novel holds the space between wish and deed open. Ivan, who lifts no hand, breaks under a guilt his reasoning cannot argue away, and Dmitri accepts punishment for a killing he did not do. Guilt, complicity and responsibility stand as separate questions, and no brother is allowed to answer them alone.
About the author
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 to 1881) was a Russian novelist whose fiction examines guilt, freedom, faith, and the divided self. Works such as Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from Underground trace how conscience and doubt press on ordinary lives. His own experience included a mock execution in 1849 and years of Siberian exile, which shaped his later writing. Freud drew on his work in the essay Dostoevsky and Parricide.
Details
- 1880
- Russian