The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы in Russian, /'bratʲjə karə'mazəvɨ/) is the last novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, generally considered the culmination of his life's work. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger and completed in November of 1880. Dostoevsky intended it to be the first part in an epic story titled The Life of a Great Sinner,[1] but he died less than four months after publication. The book is written on two levels: on the surface it is the story of a parricide in which all of a murdered man's sons share varying degrees of complicity but, on a deeper level, it is a spiritual drama of the moral struggles between faith, doubt, reason, and free will. The novel was composed mostly in Staraya Russa, which is also the main setting of the book. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed all over the world by thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud[2] and Albert Einstein[3] as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.