The Brothers Karamazov
Characters
Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov
Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is the landowner of the district, a voluntary buffoon and unbridled sensualist, father of Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, of Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov and of Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, and perhaps also of Smerdyakov, if the town...
Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov
Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, Mitya, is the eldest son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a twenty-eight-year-old former officer who looks older, muscular, with a military stride and a gaze that does not follow his mood (ch. VI of Book II). Forgotten by his...
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov
Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov is the second son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and Sofya Ivanovna, a blood brother of Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov and a half-brother of Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov. He grows up gloomy and closed, not at all timid, with the idea,...
Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov
Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, Alyosha, is the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and Sofya Ivanovna, the hero whom the narrator announces in the preface as a strange man, by no means great, but who perhaps carries within him the core of the whole...
Smerdyakov
Smerdyakov is the servant and cook of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov's household, whom the town gives the old man as a father, on a rumour never confirmed or denied within the novel: he was born to Lisaveta Smerdyashchaya, the holy fool whom a gang of drunkards...
Elder Zosima
Elder Zosima, Zinovi in the world, is the spiritual master of Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov and the third and last of a line of startsy in a monastery without relics or miraculous icons, famous because of them (ch. V of Book I). Born in a northern town,...
Grushenka
Agrafena Alexandrovna, Grushenka in the popular diminutive, is the woman around whom the rivalry between Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his son Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov revolves, and the pole that common readings reduce to the other point of the triangle...
Katerina Ivanovna
Katerina Ivanovna, Katya, is the noble fiancee of Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov, daughter of the lieutenant colonel who commanded the battalion in which Mitya served, and the woman whom Alyosha describes as beautiful, proud and domineering, with noble aims and...
Rakitin
Rakitin is a seminarian of about twenty-two, a protege of the monastery, who waits in the corner of the elder's cell with an attentive face and a calculated respect (ch. II of Book II). He is a friend of Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, who loves him even...
Lise Khokhlakova
Lise Khokhlakova is the fourteen-year-old daughter of Madame Khokhlakova, a rich widow with easy tears, and her legs have been paralysed for half a year, so that she is carried in a wheelchair (ch. III of Book II). Her mother swears that the elder cured her...
Grigory
Grigory Vasilievich is the old servant of the household of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, married to Marfa Ignatyevna, firm and unbending, who goes in a straight line to a goal whenever he takes it for true, honest and incorruptible (ch. I of Book III). He...
Kolya Krasotkin
Kolya Krasotkin is a boy of thirteen, nearly fourteen, the son of a civil servant's widow, Anna Fyodorovna, who devoted herself entirely to him from the age of eighteen and whom he has learned to order about almost like a despot (ch. I of Book X). He is small...
Ilyusha Snegiryov
Ilyusha Snegiryov is the nine-year-old son of the retired captain Nikolai Ilyich Snegiryov, a pale, sickly boy with sparkling black eyes, in an old coat he has outgrown and a torn shoe (ch. III of Book IV). He lives in a crowded hut with his mother, Arina...
Hippolyte Kirillovich
Hippolyte Kirillovich is the assistant city prosecutor, a man of about thirty-five, ill with a chest complaint, married to a fat woman without children, ambitious and irritable, who considers himself a psychologist and wronged in his career (ch. II of Book...
Fetyukovich
Fetyukovich is Mitya's lawyer, a famous defender from Petersburg, who took the case more for the fame than for the money (chapter I of Book XI), thin and tall, with a bird-like face and very close-set eyes (chapter I of Book XII). The prosecutor Hippolyte...
Other characters
- Miusov: Fyodor's first wife's cousin, a liberal back from Paris, who makes himself Mitya's guardian and forgets him, and who in the elder's cell grows irritated, humiliates himself, and flees the abbot's lunch (Book I, chapter II, Book II, chapter I, Book II, chapter VIII)
- Kalganov: the twenty-year-old, a distant relative of Miusov and friend of Alyosha, who accompanies the visitors to the monastery, grows sick of the Mokroye festivities, and weeps when Mitya is taken away (Book II, chapter I, Book VIII, chapter VIII, Book IX, chapter IX)
- Father Paisius: the austere and distrustful monk who hears Zosima's confession, reads the Gospel beside the body, and tells Ferapont that it is not men who judge (Book IV, chapter I, Book VII, chapter I)
- Father Ferapont: the old ascetic who fasts and keeps silent, tolerated as a holy fool, who sees devils, fights the system of elders, and enters Zosima's cell over the dead man to drive out demons (Book IV, chapter I, Book VII, chapter I)
- Maksimov: the small landowner from Tula who runs alongside the visitors offering himself as a guide, whom Fyodor calls Von Sohn, and whom Grushenka takes in later out of pity (Book II, chapter I, Book VIII, chapter VII, Book XI, chapter I)
- Madame Khokhlakova: the rich widow of easy tears, mother of Lise, who confesses to Zosima that she doubts the life to come, promises Mitya the gold mines and not the three thousand, and dreams of an affekt that would forgive everything (Book II, chapter IV, Book VIII, chapter III, Book XI, chapter II)
- Marfa Ignatyevna: Grigory's wife, more level-headed than her husband, who wakes hearing the cry of a newborn on the night of the son's burial and raises the alarm on the night of the crime (Book III, chapter I, Book IX, chapter II)
- Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya: the town's holy fool, a little over four and a half feet tall, loved by all, mother of Smerdyakov, who dies giving birth in Fyodor's garden (Book III, chapter II)
- Agafya Ivanovna: Katerina's half-sister, a seamstress, to whom Mitya says he would give the money for their father if the girl from the institute came to fetch it in secret, and who tells her sister about the offer (Book III, chapter IV)
- Samsonov: the old merchant, sick in his legs, Grushenka's protector, who sends Mitya as a joke to a peasant named Lyagavy (Book VIII, chapter I)
- Perkhotin: the young clerk and collector of guns, who receives Mitya's pistols as a pledge and who, uneasy, sets the inquiry in motion (Book VIII, chapter III, Book VIII, chapter V, Book IX, chapter I)
- Fenya: Grushenka's maid, who tells Mitya about the trip to Mokroye and kneels so that he will not ruin her mistress (Book VIII, chapter V)
- Trifon Borisych: the owner of the Mokroye inn, who knows how to change his face into a servile mask when he smells profit, receives Mitya with festivity and afterward testifies against him (Book VIII, chapter VI, Book IX, chapter VIII)
- Andrei: the driver of the Mokroye troika, who answers Mitya's question about hell with the legend of a hell that fills up with the powerful, and who testifies at the inquiry (Book VIII, chapter VI, Book IX, chapter VIII)
- Mussyalovich and Vrublevsky: the two Poles whom Grushenka meets in Mokroye, to whom Mitya offers three thousand rubles so that they will leave, who cheat at cards and afterward testify with haughtiness (Book VIII, chapter VII, Book IX, chapter VIII)
- Nikolai Parfenovich: the young examining magistrate, just arrived from Petersburg, small, vain, and refined, who worships the prosecutor and conducts Mitya's three ordeals (Book IX, chapter II, Book IX, chapter IX)
- Mikhail Makarovich: the hospitable district police chief, a widower who knows little about his own office, in whose house the magistrates gather, and who shouts "parricide" at Mitya at the Mokroye party (Book VIII, chapter VIII, Book IX, chapter II)
- Markel: Zosima's brother, eight years older, tubercular, who dies saying that life is a paradise and that each is guilty before all, and who asks forgiveness of the servants and the birds (Book VI, chapter II)
- Afanasy: the orderly whom the young officer Zosima strikes on the eve of the duel, and to whom he asks forgiveness, and whom he meets again eight years later at a fair (Book VI, chapter II, Book VI, chapter III)
- Smurov: the left-handed boy who throws stones with his schoolmates at Ilyusha, whom Kolya takes with him to the captain's house, and who in the Epilogue says that Ilyusha's stone is there (Book IV, chapter III, Book X, chapter III, Epilogue, chapter III)
- Kartashov: the quiet, shy boy who answers the question about who founded Troy, is put down by Kolya and his face burns, and who at the funeral shouts that he respects Mitya (Book X, chapter V, Epilogue, chapter III)
- Maria Kondratyevna: the daughter of the landlady of the house next to Fyodor's garden, who hears Smerdyakov sing and say that he hates all of Russia, and in whose house he lives after the crime (Book V, chapter II, Book XI, chapter VII)
- Herzenstube: the old German doctor of the town, who treats Smerdyakov and Lise, and who at the trial tells of Mitya as a child without boots and of the pound of nuts (Book II, chapter IV, Book XII, chapter III)