The Russian Novel and Naturalism

Fyodor Dostoevsky explored the psychology of guilt, faith, and moral extremity with an intensity that set his fiction apart from Western European Realism. Crime and Punishment (1866) follows the impoverished student Raskolnikov through the murder of a pawnbroker and its shattering psychological aftermath, while The Brothers Karamazov (1880), his final and most philosophically ambitious novel, weaves questions of faith, doubt, and patricide through the fates of three brothers. Dostoevsky's own experience of a mock execution and subsequent years of Siberian exile and penal labor, following his arrest for participation in a radical discussion circle, deeply informed his fiction's preoccupation with suffering and redemption.