The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Shayan writes:
For our independent reading project I am reading The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky was born to a middle-class family in Moscow, Russia on October 30, 1821. His father, an oppressive man, was a doctor and his mom, who was a very kind and religious woman, died before he was sixteen. His father insisted that he be an engineer, so in 1837, he went to a military engineering school in St. Petersburg. While he was studying his father was murdered by his own serfs. Some of Dostoyevsky’s literary works suggest that his epilepsy was a symptom of his own internal wish for his father’s death.
              On April 22, 1849 Dostoyevsky was arrested. He was accused of four different charges the most serious being that he was in a plot to kill the tsar. He denied this but it was to no avail. On December 22, 1849 he was marched out to face his death. In the end, it turned out to be a mock execution which was so terrifyingly realistic, that one of the other prisoners went insane. Dostoyevsky was exiled to Siberia to serve his sentence of hard-labor. When Fyodor Dostoyevsky was done serving his sentence, he emerged spiritually and philosophically transformed.
              Dostoyevsky, once free, resumed his literary career in St. Petersburg. This time period however was marked with financial insecurity and the death of his brother and wife. In 1867 Dostoyevsky and his second wife escaped creditors by moving to Europe where he wrote a few very important literary works. Dostoyevsky returned to Russia in 1871 where he began his final decade of monumental literary activity. It was in this time period that he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, a novel that “explores the conflict between intellect and faith and between the forces of evil and the redemptive power of Christianity”. Fyodor Dostoyevsky died a few months after completing this novel in his home in St. Petersburg on January 28, 1881.