Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, "The Karamazov Brothers" (1880), is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Karamazov is murdered; his sons - atheist intellectual Ivan, hot-blooded Dmitry, and saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved.
Bound up with this intense drama is an exploration of many deeply felt ideas about God, freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disastrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Church, the law, and even the author's most cherished causes and beliefs are presented with irreverence, so that orthodoxy and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive.