The Brothers Karamazov

A father is murdered and three sons are suspects: the sensualist who wanted his money and his woman, the intellectual who proved that everything is permitted, and the novice who believes. Dostoevsky wrote it in the last two years of his life, working from the case of a man he had known in prison who was convicted of parricide and later cleared. The trial takes a whole book and settles nothing. Thirty-two plates of Russian grief and faith by painters from Korzukhin to Nesterov, the visual world of parricide, wakes and village cemeteries that Dostoevsky's novel inhabits.