ABSTRACT
The Petrashevsky circle has been described by Professor Venturi as ‘a strange, circumscribed society’. In The Brothers Karamazov the whole thought of Dostoevsky is to be found. Whereas Tolstoy’s last major novel Resurrection shows a narrowing down of his genius, and Turgenev’s last major novel Virgin Soil was written partly from hypothesis, The Brothers Karamazov includes and surpasses all Dostoevsky’s previous work. Dostoevsky’s novels show always ‘the passion of the special case’. In them great questions are dramatized: extraordinary questions through the experience of ordinary people amid squalor and mediocrity. For in The Brothers Karamazov , even more than in his previous novels, Dostoevsky realizes that tendency of the Russian genius to seek truth through excess, and by extremes of self-assertion and self-abnegation. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky achieve a completeness in the novel unsurpassed by the novelists of any literature.
