The Brothers Karamazov [antikvár]

i ( Dostoyevsky began writing The Brothers Karamazov, his last and his greatest novel, in June 1878, and finished it in October 1880, about three months before his death. 'You cant imagine,' he wrote to the Slavophil poet and attic Ivan Aksakov on 21 September 1880, 'how busy I am at present. I am working hard day and night. Yes, I am finishing the Karamazovs and reviewing in my mind the work tvhich I, at any rate, think highly of, for there is a great deal of my own in it. I am, as a rule, highly strung when working -my work gives me a great deal of pain and worry. When working hard, I am even physically ill. Now I am striking a balance of what I have been revolving in my mind for three years, drafting it and writing it down. It has to be done well, that is to say, at least as best as I can The time has come when it has to be finished and finished without any further delay In spite of the fact that I have been writing it for three years, I keep rewriting some chapters again and again. I write and reject Only the inspired passages come off at once, the rest requires a great deal of hard work ' As a matter offact, Dostoyevsky had been revolving the subject of his last novel in his mindfor much longer than three years. All his four masterpieces are essentially murder stories, but each of them deals with a different aspect of murder. Crime and Punishment revolves round the idea whether the murder of an evil old woman, an unscrupulous moneylender, can be justified if it helps to provide the means for a brilliant career of an impecunious student; The Idiot deals with murder as a result of carnal passion set against the Christian ideal of forgiveness; in The Devils the motive for murder is political, while in The Brothers Karamazov it is the most heinous form of murder that comes under close scrutiny - parricide, a subject that seems to have exercised a powerful fascination over Dostoyevsky since early childhood. 'As a boy of ten' Dostoyevsky wrote to a correspondent on 18 August 1880, from Staraya Russa, where he usually spent the summer « * L I ' ta'i ' .1 1 1 .'I f > 'I'i'i ' y