[2] Although Dostoevsky began his first notes for The Brothers Karamazov in April 1878, the novel incorporated elements and themes from an earlier unfinished project he had begun in 1869 entitled The Life of a Great Sinner.

Ilyinsky, who is described in Dostoevsky's memoir-novel Notes from the House of the Dead as "always in the liveliest, merriest spirits", was in prison for murdering his father in order to obtain his inheritance, although he always steadfastly maintained his innocence.

Book V, entitled "Pro and Contra", is primarily about "the inner debate taking place in Ivan between his recognition of the moral sublimity of the Christian ideal and his outrage against a universe of pain and suffering.

In creating the character of Alyosha, Dostoevsky was in large part addressing himself to the contemporary Russian radical youth, as a positive alternative to the atheistic approach to justice and attainment of the good.

Her growing friendship with Alyosha leads her toward a path of spiritual redemption, and hidden qualities of gentleness and generosity emerge, though her fiery temper and pride remain intact.

V. L. Komarovich suggests that the rhythm of the prose is "a departure from all the norms of modern syntax, and at the same time imparts to the entire narration a special, emotional colouring of ceremonial and ideal tranquility.

In perhaps the most famous chapter in the novel, "The Grand Inquisitor", Ivan narrates to Alyosha his imagined poem that describes an encounter between a leader from the Spanish Inquisition and Jesus, who has made his return to Earth.

Upon learning this, Dmitri loads a cart with food and wine and pays for a huge orgy to finally confront Grushenka in the presence of her old flame, intending all the while to kill himself at dawn.

All of the evidence points toward Dmitri; the only other person in the house at the time of the murder, apart from Gregory and his wife, was Smerdyakov, who was incapacitated due to an epileptic seizure he suffered the day before.

The book ends with Ivan having a hallucination in which he is visited by the devil, in the form of an idle and parasitic former gentleman, who torments him by personifying and caricaturing his thoughts and ideas.

Alyosha cautiously approves, because he feels that Dmitri is not emotionally ready to submit to such a harsh sentence, that he is innocent, and that no guards or officers would suffer for aiding the escape.

One of the novel's central themes is the counterposition of the true spiritual meaning of the Orthodox Christian faith, particularly insofar as it is posited as the heart of Russian national identity and history, with the ideas and values emanating from the new doctrines of atheism, rationalism, socialism and nihilism.

"[18] Dostoevsky wrote to his editor that his intention with book V, "Pro and Contra", was to portray "the seed of the idea of destruction in our time in Russia among the young people uprooted from reality".

"[19] In the chapter "Rebellion", the rationale behind Ivan's rejection of God's world is expounded in a long dialogue with Alyosha, in which he justifies his atheism on the grounds of the very principle—universal love and compassion—that is at the heart of the Christian faith.

The unmitigated evil in the world, particularly as it relates to the suffering of children, is not something that can be accepted by a heart steeped in love, so Ivan feels bound in his conscience to "humbly return the ticket" to God.

According to Mikhail Bakhtin, "both the very form of its construction as The Grand Inquisitor's dialogue with Christ and at the same time with himself, and the very unexpectedness and duality of its finale, indicate an internally dialogic disintegration at its ideological core.

"[21] With Book VI, "The Russian Monk", Dostoevsky sought to provide the refutation of Ivan's negation of God, through the teachings of the dying Elder, Zosima.

Dostoevsky based Zosima's teachings on those of the 18th century Orthodox saint and spiritual writer Tikhon of Zadonsk, and constructed them around his own formulation of the essence of a true Christian faith: that all are responsible for all, and that "everyone is guilty before all and for everything, and therefore everyone is strong enough also to forgive everything for others".

He was acutely aware of the difficulty of the artistic task he had set himself and of the incompatibility of the form and content of his "reply" with ordinary discourse and the everyday concerns of his contemporaries.

Though the affirmation of freedom and rejection of mechanistic psychology is most openly and forcefully expressed through the character of Dmitri, as a theme it pervades the entire novel and virtually all of Dostoevsky's other writings.

In Dostoevsky, a fundamental refusal to be wholly defined by an external source (another person, a social interpretation, an ideology, a system of 'knowledge', or anything at all that places a finalizing limit on the primordial freedom of the living soul, including even death) is at the heart of the character.

Admirers include scientists such as Albert Einstein,[29] philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein[30] and Martin Heidegger,[31] as well as writers such as Virginia Woolf,[32] Cormac McCarthy,[33] Haruki Murakami,[34] and Frederick Buechner.

Ivan's poem "The Grand Inquisitor" is arguably one of the best-known passages in modern literature due to its ideas about human nature, freedom, power, authority, and religion, as well as for its fundamental ambiguity.

[45][page needed] A reference to the poem can be found in English novelist Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited and American writer David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest.

[32] In an essay on The Brothers Karamazov, written after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse described Dostoevsky as not a "poet" but a "prophet".

American philosophical novelist Walker Percy said in an interview:[48]I suppose my model is nearly always Dostoevsky, who was a man of very strong convictions, but his characters illustrated and incarnated the most powerful themes and issues and trends of his day.

I think maybe the greatest novel of all time is The Brothers Karamazov which...almost prophesies and prefigures everything—all the bloody mess and the issues of the 20th century.Pope Benedict XVI cited the book in the 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi.

His copy of The Brothers Karamazov reveals extensive highlights and notes in the margins that he made while reading the work, which have been studied and analyzed by multiple researchers.

In his Brothers Karamazov the odd, fussy tone of the narrator is well rendered in the preface...At times, indeed, the convoluted style might make the reader unfamiliar with Dostoevsky's Russian question the translator's command of English.

"[62] This is a list of unabridged English translations of the novel:[63][64] There have been several film adaptations of The Brothers Karamazov, including: A Russian 12-episode series was produced in 2009 and is considered to be as close to the book as possible.