The Brothers Karamazov: Introduction by Malcolm Jones

Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel is, above all, the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. It is a masterpiece that chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between an outsized father and his three very different sons.

The author's towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues – brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality – that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia.

This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky – the definitive version in English – magnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece.