Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 7, 2005

The Brothers Karamazov is generally considered the greatest novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and the culmination of his life's work. It has been acclaimed all over the world, from authors as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Andrew R. MacAndrew, and Konstantin Mochulsky, as a masterpiece of literature and one of the greatest novels ever written. The basic structure of the book is arranged in two arcs. On the surface the book relates the story of a patricide in which all of the murdered man's sons share varying degrees of complicity. But on a deeper level this is a spiritual drama chronicling the moral struggles between faith, doubt, reason, and free will. The novel was composed primarily in Staraya Russa, which also served as the main setting for the book. Dostoevsky spent the better part of two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published in serial form in The Russian Messenger, and completed in November of 1880. The author died less than four months after publication.

Recently featured: Benjamin Mountfort – Windows XP – Steve Dalkowski