Brothers Karamazov Lecture

The Brothers Karamazov represents Dostoevskyâ s solution to the search that his entire life represents. As an educated man, an intellectual, even in a backward Russia, he was preoccupied with the question of Godâ s existenceâ and even more, with the question of Christâ s redemption of the human. He had tried to depict what the follower of Christ must be like throughout his writings, beginning with the negative Notes from Underground, going on to locate Christian faith in Sonya, a prostitute, who reads to the murderer Raskolnikov the story of Lazarus. He tried the image of a perfectly good man in The Idiot, only to find that goodness as we can conceive of it is not only insufficient but turns rapidly to something negative and destructive.