In a provincial Russian town, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner, usurer, and buffoon, has three sons by two wives and raised none of them: Mitya, the sensualist, who challenges him over money and over Grushenka; Ivan, the intellectual, who accepts God and refuses the world He created; and Alyosha, the novice of the monastery, disciple of Elder Zosima. A meeting in the cell to divide the inheritance turns into a scandal, and from then on the father's house fills with signs, rivalries, and silences, until the old man is killed one night when Ivan is in Moscow, Smerdyakov, the epileptic servant, lies in an apparent fit, and Mitya walks through the garden with a pestle in his pocket. Mitya is arrested, questioned, tried, and convicted, although the murderer confessed to Ivan and hanged himself, and the novel ends with the burial of the boy Ilyusha and with Alyosha's wager on the good memory. The story is driven by one question (what sustains faith and justice in the face of a child's suffering and of the freedom to desire what one should not do) and by a parricide that the novel shows from every side and never from within. The arc runs from the meeting in the cell, through the poem of the Grand Inquisitor, through Zosima's death and Mitya's rush to Mokroye, and ends at the trial, in Ivan's devil and in the circle of boys beside the stone.
Book I: The history of a family
The narrator opens the novel by asking leave to tell the life of Alyosha, a hero whom he himself calls eccentric, and warns that the biography is one but the novels are two, the one of thirteen years ago and the present one (preface). He introduces the father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a base and depraved landowner, but shrewd about money, who marries Adelaida Ivanovna Miusova, sees his wife run off with a seminarian, keeps the three-year-old son, and, on learning of her death in a Petersburg attic, no one knows whether he laughs or cries (chapter I). The boy, Mitya, is forgotten in the hut of the servant Grigory, passes through the hands of Miusov and of relatives in Moscow, grows up without a family, and as an adult discovers that the father spent the whole inheritance he believed he had in advances (chapter II). Fyodor marries again, Sofya Ivanovna, an orphan raised by a general's widow and prone to fits of possession, and has with her Ivan and Alyosha; when she dies, the general's widow comes to fetch the boys, and after her death Marshal Polenov, who pays for their education, raises them. Ivan grows up withdrawn, studies in Moscow, publishes a strange article on the ecclesiastical court, and appears in his father's town without the narrator being able to say why (chapter III). Alyosha, at twenty, seeks his mother's grave and tells Fyodor that he will enter the monastery; the father, who says he takes after the possessed woman, asks him to find out the truth there and come back to tell him, because the son is the only one who did not condemn him (chapter IV). The narrator defines Alyosha as a realist, for whom faith is not born of miracle, explains what a starets is, portrays Elder Zosima, and tells how Mitya's quarrel with his father over the inheritance leads to the meeting set in the cell, which Alyosha dreads for Miusov's irony, Ivan's coldness, and the father's scenes (chapter V).
Book II: An untimely meeting
At the end of August, the visitors reach the monastery in two carriages, Miusov with the young Kalganov, and Fyodor with Ivan, while Mitya is late. Miusov grows annoyed because no monk comes to receive them, and Fyodor promises to behave, without much conviction (chapter I). In the cell, before Elder Zosima, Fyodor presents himself as a true buffoon, tells anecdotes that disgust Miusov, and confesses that he performs out of shame; Zosima tells him not to be so ashamed of himself and, above all, not to lie to himself (chapter II). Outside, the starets receives the common women: he tells the mother of a boy of almost three that she should not console herself but weep, because the child is an angel of God, and tells a young widow that no sin exhausts God's love (chapter III). Madame Khokhlakova, who doubts the life to come, hears that the only proof is the experience of active love, and Lise, her daughter with paralyzed legs, complains that Alyosha has forgotten her (chapter IV). Inside the cell, the guests discuss Ivan's article: he holds that the Church must contain the whole State within itself, and Zosima adds that the only punishment that corrects is that of conscience (chapter V). Mitya arrives, his father accuses him before the monks because of Katerina Ivanovna and Grushenka, Mitya asks what kind of man lives for such a thing, and Zosima kneels before him and touches the floor with his forehead (chapter VI). The starets sends Alyosha to serve at the abbot's lunch and tells him to leave the monastery when he dies; Rakitin, who waits for him in the avenue, reads the gesture as the scent of a future crime between the brothers and the father (chapter VII). At the abbot's lunch, Fyodor returns after having decided to leave, accuses the monks of sucking the people dry, and goes out shouting that he is taking Alyosha away, and the meeting set to divide an inheritance ends without ever having dealt with money (chapter VIII).
Book III: The sensualists
In Fyodor's house live the old servant Grigory, of unbending loyalty, his wife Marfa, and the young Smerdyakov. On the day of the burial of the six-fingered son the couple lost, Grigory finds in the garden bathhouse a holy fool who has just given birth (chapter I). It was Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya, the town's beloved holy fool, impregnated one night by someone no one could name (the town blames Fyodor, who swears he is innocent); she dies at dawn, and Grigory raises the boy, who comes to be called Smerdyakov (chapter II). Alyosha, on the way to Katerina Ivanovna's house, is called by Mitya to a hidden arbor and hears the first confession, in verse: Schiller's hymn, the insect of sensuality, the beauty that is terrible because in it the devil wrestles with God in men's hearts (chapter III). The second confession, in anecdotes, tells how Mitya gave Katerina the four thousand five hundred rubles she came to fetch to save her father, asking nothing in return, and how she prostrated herself before him (chapter IV). The third says what he hides: Katerina asked him in marriage by letter, he spent in Mokroye on Grushenka the three thousand she had entrusted to him, and he sends Alyosha to ask the father for the money, swearing he will kill the old man if Grushenka goes to him (chapter V). In the father's room, the servant Smerdyakov is presented through his gestures since childhood (chapter VI) and defends, with an argument that makes Ivan attentive, that denying the faith under torture is not a sin (chapter VII). Drunk, Fyodor asks his sons whether there is God and whether there is immortality, and Ivan answers no and Alyosha yes, until Mitya bursts through the door (chapter VIII). Mitya invades the house, knocks down Grigory, and beats his father; Ivan tells Alyosha that one reptile will devour the other, and reserves for himself full freedom in his desires (chapter IX). At Katerina's house, Grushenka refuses to kiss his hand and humiliates him before Alyosha (chapter X). Mitya, on the road, warns his brother that he is going to commit the dishonor that could have been prevented, and Alyosha, at the monastery, reads the letter in which Lise says she loves him, and falls asleep praying for everyone (chapter XI).
Book IV: The disturbances
The elder Zosima wakes up very weak, confesses, receives communion, and says farewell to the monks, saying that no one is more holy for living there and that each one is guilty before all. The news of a miracle, a mother who receives a letter from a son given up for dead, stirs the monastery and gives strength to Father Ferapont, the holy fool who sees devils and fights the system of elders (chapter I). Alyosha first goes to his father, whose face is swollen from the beating, who lays out to him the philosophy of one who wants neither paradise nor accounts to render, and the son answers that he is not wicked, he is a crippled man (chapter II). On the road, six schoolboys stone a lone boy; the boy throws a stone at Alyosha for being a Karamazov and bites his finger to the bone, and Alyosha, instead of retaliating, asks what he did to him (chapter III). At the Khokhlakovs' house, the lady speaks of the nadryv going on in the next room, and Lise, whom he had come to see, pretends the letter was a joke and loses her footing when Alyosha takes it as a marriage proposal (chapter IV). In the drawing room, Katerina Ivanovna announces that she will never leave Mitya and will be his god; Alyosha tells her that she is acting and that she loves Mitya in the nadryv; and Ivan, wounded, says her love grows with insults and announces he is leaving. She then asks Alyosha to take two hundred rubles to the captain whom Mitya humiliated (chapter V). In the hut of Captain Snegiryov, Alyosha recognizes the boy who bit him, Ilyusha, and sees the man who speaks in two voices, a buffoon before his own people and a helpless father when alone (chapter VI). Outdoors, the captain recounts the scene in the square, receives the bills with joy and tramples them on the ground, saying he does not sell his honor and would not know what to say to his son (chapter VII).
Book V: Pro and Contra
At the Khokhlakovs' house, Alyosha tells Lise why he did not run after the captain who trampled the money; the two confess their love and get engaged, and he says suddenly that perhaps he does not believe in God (chapter I). Jumping the fence of the garden next to his father's, looking for Mitya, Alyosha hears Smerdyakov sing with a guitar to a girl, say he hates all of Russia, and confess that Mitya threatened to kill him if he let Grushenka in (chapter II). In the tavern, Ivan tells his brother that he loves life before any logic, that he accepts God and does not accept the world He created (chapter III). To explain the refusal, Ivan gathers cases of tortured children, asks Alyosha whether he would consent to found the peace of men on the tears of a single one of them, hears that he would not, and respectfully returns his entry ticket (chapter IV). In response, he tells the poem of the Grand Inquisitor: Christ returns to Seville, is arrested, and the cardinal explains to him that the Church corrected his work with miracle, mystery, and authority to make men happy; the prisoner kisses him in silence, and Alyosha kisses Ivan, who tells him he does not renounce the formula that everything is permitted (chapter V). Returning, Ivan finds Smerdyakov at the gate, who passes on to him the knock code, the envelope with three thousand rubles, the account of forty thousand for each son, and the advice to give up everything (chapter VI). Ivan overhears his father from the stairs, leaves for Moscow without going to Chermashnya, calls himself a scoundrel on arrival, and the book closes with Smerdyakov fallen in the cellar in a fit, Grigory in bed, and Fyodor locked in, waiting for Grushenka (chapter VII).
Book VI: A Russian monk
On Zosima's last afternoon, the cell fills with friends of many years. The starets greets Alyosha, sends him to look for Mitya, before whose future suffering he prostrated himself, says that he will leave the monastery and remain a monk in the world, and explains that he loves the boy's face because it recalls the brother who brought him to the monastery (chapter I). In the manuscript that Alyosha wrote from memory, Zosima tells his life: his brother Markel, tubercular, who dies saying that life is a paradise and that each is guilty before all; the young officer who beats his orderly Afanasy, asks his pardon, asks forgiveness of his rival in the duel, throws the pistol into the bushes, and goes to the monastery; and the mysterious visitor who confesses in public a murder committed fourteen years before, and whom they take for a madman (chapter II). In his teachings, the starets answers the freedom of the world, which multiplies needs, with the renunciation of the monk, says that the people is the bearer of God, orders one to love all creation, to always choose humble love and to judge no one, defines hell as the suffering of no longer being able to love, and dies on his knees, kissing the earth (chapter III).
Book VII: Alyosha
With Zosima's body in the coffin, a smell of corruption rises before its time, the monks who are enemies of the starets system rejoice, Father Ferapont enters expelling demons, and Father Paisius answers him that it is not men who judge; Alyosha leaves the hermitage without asking for a blessing (chapter I). The narrator explains that the young man's wound is not lack of faith, it is the supreme justice he saw violated. Rakitin finds him lying under a tree, hears that he does not rebel against God, only refuses His world, and invites him to Grushenka's house (chapter II). There, Grushenka, who expected to devour him, jumps off his lap on learning that the starets died, tells the fable of the onion, confesses that she wanted to destroy him, and lets slip the message for Mitya as she sets off for Mokroye (chapter III). Back beside the coffin, Alyosha falls asleep listening to the Gospel of Cana, dreams of Zosima at the feast saying that he gave an onion and that he too gave one, goes out and kisses the earth, and rises a firm fighter for the rest of his life (chapter IV).
Book VIII: Mitya
Mitya runs after three thousand rubles to return to Katerina Ivanovna before starting life over with Grushenka, and goes to the merchant Samsonov to offer him his rights to Chermashnya; the old man, as a joke, sends him to a peasant named Lyagavy (chapter I). Mitya sells his watch, goes to Ilinskoye and on foot to Sukhoy Posyolok, and fails to wake the drunk, who the next day treats him with contempt, and he realizes he was sent there on purpose (chapter II). He pawns his pistols to Perkhotin, goes to Madame Khokhlakova's house, and hears that she will give him much more than three thousand, the gold mines, but not the three thousand; from there he takes a copper pestle from Grushenka's kitchen (chapter III). He jumps the fence of his father's garden, knocks the agreed signal at the window, takes the pestle out of his pocket, and the scene cuts to Grigory, who grabs him by the leg and falls wounded; Mitya flees and discovers that Grushenka went to Mokroye to meet the officer (chapter IV). With blood on his hands and a bundle of banknotes he cannot explain, Mitya recovers the pistols, orders champagne, and writes a note in which he punishes himself for the rest of his life (chapter V). In Andrei's troika he asks God not to judge him, and at the Mokroye inn he sees Grushenka from afar and goes in (chapter VI). He humbles himself before the Poles, tries to buy off the officer, and Grushenka, hearing it, breaks with her rival and says that what she loved was his rage (chapter VII). At the party, Grushenka tells Mitya that she belongs to him and that he should take her far away; he confesses that he is a thief, and the authorities open the curtain and accuse him of having killed his father (chapter VIII).
Book IX: The preliminary investigation
Perkhotin, who saw blood on Mitya's hands, decides to act only after Madame Khokhlakova denies having given him the three thousand rubles and after hearing her conclude, alone, that Mitya killed his father (chapter I). At the police chief's house, the prosecutor Hippolyte Kirillovich and the examining magistrate Nikolai Parfenovich already know of the crime from the alarm raised by Grigory and his wife, Marfa Ignatyevna, who found him wounded some twenty paces from the fence, where he had dragged himself. They read Mitya as the braggart who kills himself after a binge, and the empty envelope, found behind the screen, shows that the three thousand had been there (chapter II). At Mokroye, in the first ordeal, Mitya shouts that he is not guilty of his father's blood, Grushenka accuses herself of being the cause, and he calms down only on learning that Grigory is alive (chapter III). In the second, he refuses to say to whom he owed the three thousand and, with sarcasm, dictates to the clerk that he took the pestle to kill his father (chapter IV). In the third, he recounts the leap over Grigory and the open garden door, rules out Smerdyakov as the guilty one, and refuses to say where the rubles he carries came from (chapter V). Stripped before everyone, he swears that the one who opened the door to his father is not Dmitri Karamazov, and the prosecutor tells him that Grigory saw the door open (chapter VI). Mitya reveals the secret of the fifteen hundred: half of Katerina's money, which he sewed around his neck, and the shame of having separated it from the three thousand (chapter VII). The witnesses, the innkeeper, the Poles, and Maksimov speak of six thousand, and Grushenka says she believes everything he swears; Mitya falls asleep and dreams of the child who is cold in the arms of a burned peasant woman (chapter VIII). On being arrested, he says he accepts the punishment for having wanted to kill his father, bids farewell to Grushenka and to the people, and leaves in a cart (chapter IX).
Book X: Ilyusha's death
Kolya Krasotkin, nearly fourteen, son of a widow who surrounds him with an affection he rejects as a calf's tenderness, has a reputation for despair since his bet to lie down between the rails, and keeps a secret: he was the boy whom Ilyusha stabbed in the thigh (chapter I). On a Sunday in November he leaves the tenant's children with the maid, promises them a little cannon, and goes out with the dog Perezvon on a most important matter (chapter II). With little Smurov in tow, he crosses the fair giving lessons in free spirit and confesses that he likes to stir up fools (chapter III). In front of the captain's house, he meets Alyosha and explains why he cut off relations with Ilyusha, the boy who threw a bread roll with a pin at the dog Zhuchka; Alyosha tells him that the captain's buffoonery is tragic (chapter IV). At Ilyusha's bedside, Kolya brings in Perezvon, who is Zhuchka herself, found, hidden, and trained by him, and the sick boy recognizes her, while Kolya tells the story of the goose and humiliates the timid Kartashov with the question of who founded Troy (chapter V). In the vestibule, Kolya repeats to Alyosha second-hand ideas, God as a hypothesis and Christ as a revolutionary, and Alyosha disarms them without refuting them, saying that self-love is the devil of the generation; Kolya confesses that he is profoundly unhappy (chapter VI). The Moscow doctor says only the climate of Sicily could save the boy, Ilyusha asks his father to bury him by the big stone, and the captain answers that he does not want another boy (chapter VII).
Book XI: Ivan Fyodorovich
On the eve of the trial, Alyosha hears from Grushenka that Mitya speaks to him of a boy and that Ivan visited him in secret (chapter I). Madame Khokhlakova receives him in an affekt that would forgive everything, and confesses that she would prefer that Mitya had killed (chapter II). Lise confesses to Alyosha her wish to be tortured and to see evil done, crushes her finger in the door after handing him a note for Ivan (chapter III). In the cell, Mitya tells him that he will go to Siberia for everyone, even without having killed, and sings the underground hymn to God's joy; he confesses that Ivan proposed an escape and wants to know whether his brother judges him innocent (chapter IV). After a scene at Katerina Ivanovna's house, Alyosha tells Ivan in the street that it was not he who killed their father, and Ivan breaks with him (chapter V). Ivan recalls his first visit to Smerdyakov, who convinced him that the guilty one was Mitya, and his own anguish over the listening on the stairs (chapter VI). On the second visit, the servant tells him that he wanted another to kill, and Katerina shows him a letter in which Mitya threatened to kill the father (chapter VII). On the third, Smerdyakov confesses the crime, hands over the three thousand, and says that Ivan is the legitimate murderer (chapter VIII). At home, Ivan talks with a vulgar devil seated on the sofa, who gives him back his own ideas, and wakes at Alyosha's knock on the window with the news of the hanging (chapter IX). Ivan tells Alyosha that the devil is himself, that conscience is a habit, and Alyosha, seeing him fall asleep, prays and asks whether he will rise in truth or perish in hatred (chapter X).
Book XII: A judicial error
The trial opens in a room full of ladies and curious people from other towns, before twelve jurors of severe appearance, and Mitya declares himself guilty of drunkenness and debauchery, but denies the theft and the blood (chapter I). The witnesses for the prosecution, from Grigory to Rakitin and Captain Snegiryov, are discredited by the lawyer Fetyukovich, without his offering any version of his own, and the captain refuses to testify because his dying son asked him not to (chapter II). The experts contradict one another, and the old doctor Herzenstube tells of the pound of nuts he brought to the boy who had no boots (chapter III). The defense testifies: Alyosha has only his brother's face as proof, and Katerina Ivanovna recounts the bow to the floor that Mitya wanted to hide (chapter IV). Ivan enters sick, has the bundle of money from the envelope handed to the president, declares that the murderer is Smerdyakov and that he instigated him, and Katerina, in a fit, hands over the tavern letter, which condemns Mitya (chapter V). The prosecutor Hippolyte Kirillovich begins with the horror of no longer being horrified, and presents the Karamazovs as a mirror of Russia, capable of contemplating both abysses (chapter VI). He reconstructs the case, replaces the mania for expert opinion with jealousy and the argument of the letter written drunk (chapter VII), and examines Smerdyakov only to reject him as guilty, because no other name comes to mind (chapter VIII). He closes with Gogol's troika and the request for a deed in the defendant's favor (chapter IX). Fetyukovich replies that the sum of the facts does not withstand any one of them taken alone, and that psychology is a stick with two ends (chapter X), denies that the three thousand ever existed (chapter XI), proposes Smerdyakov as the author (chapter XII), and asks the jurors to crush the defendant with mercy, defining a father as one who begot and deserved (chapter XIII). In the rejoinder, the prosecutor fears for the foundations of the family, Mitya swears that he did not do it, and the jury declares him guilty without extenuating circumstances, while he forgives Katerina and asks that Grushenka be spared (chapter XIV).
Epilogue: Ilyusha's funeral
Five days after the trial, Katerina Ivanovna, who is nursing Ivan through a fever at her house, confesses to Alyosha that the courtroom scene was the work of her fury, lays out Mitya's escape plan, and gives in to his request to go see him (chapter I). In the hospital, Alyosha tells Mitya that the cross is not for him, Mitya says he loves the Russian God, Katerina tells him that love has passed and that she will love him forever, and Grushenka, on entering, refuses the forgiveness that Katerina asks for (chapter II). Twelve boys and the captain bury Ilyusha; the captain cries out that he wants him beside the stone, and Alyosha, beside the stone, tells the boys that the highest thing for life is a good memory, that they will rise from the dead to see one another again, and Kolya shouts a hurrah for Karamazov (chapter III).