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1-Page Summary of The Brothers Karamazov
Overall Summary
Fyodor Karamazov is a twice married old man who became the father of three sons. He also had an affair with Stinking Lizaveta, which resulted in Smerdyakov, his servant. Fyodor was known for having orgies at home and being drunk most of the time. His children were left to Grigory’s care while he wasted his life away.
There are three Karamazov boys: Dmitri, Ivan and Alexei. Dmitri is a soldier while Ivan is an intellectual. Both of them differ from their father, Fyodor Karamazov. Alexei enters the monastery to become a monk under the tutelage of Zosima who’s revered by many as the Elder. One day, Madame Khokhlakov brings her paralyzed daughter Lise to see Zosima because she hopes that he’ll make her walk again with his blessings. However, when they arrive at the monastery together with other people including Fyodor Karamazov and Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov (Madame Khokhlakov’s son), things get out of hand due to their different personalities and opinions which leads to a quarrel between Miusov and Fyodor over how they’re acting in front of Zosima.
The hostility within the family is revealed when Fyodor shows how Dmitri abandoned his fiancée, Katerina Ivanovna, to take up with a “courtesan” named Grushenka. Meanwhile, Alexei’s supposed friend and Ivan’s rival Mikhail Osipovich Rakitin believes that Ivan Fyodorovich is trying to steal Katerina away from Dmitri. Katerina is a beautiful girl whose pride comes from her acts of self-sacrifice. She offers herself to Dmitri after her father attempts suicide because he embezzled government funds. Her sister Agafya tells her that if she goes to him and offers herself, he will give her forty-five hundred roubles.
After her father dies, Katerina goes to Moscow. She’s welcomed into the family of a general’s widow, who has two nieces as her closest heirs. One niece died and the other one is in poor health so she doesn’t have any heirs except for Katerina. The widow gives Katerina a dowry of eighty thousand roubles with which she buys herself new clothes and jewelry. She takes forty-five hundred—the sum that Dmitri asked her to take from his pocket—and sends it along with a letter in which she demands him to marry her because he promised to do so when they were engaged years ago. Dmitri explains this matter in a six-page letter to Ivan who’s already in Moscow at that time, asking him to meet with Katerina and explain why he can’t marry her because he’s already involved with Grushenka whom he loves very much even if she’s not an ideal woman for him but still better than Katarina according to his standards at that moment (he wants someone else). He also asks Ivan if there was anything between them before since Katarina knows about their past relationship.
In Moscow, Ivan falls in love with Katerina and tells Fyodor Pavlovich about it. Meanwhile, Dmitri is worried that his father will give the money he owes to Grushenka to a woman named Katerina. He asks Alexei to go see their father and ask for the money so that he can pay off his debt. When Alexei goes to do this, he learns that Grushenka has been there too. She lied when she said she would stop seeing Dmitri because she still loves him (and we learn later on why). After getting back from Moscow, Alexei reads Lise’s letter in which she professes her love for him.
One day, Alexei visited his father and found out that he refused to let Dmitri have Grushenka. After leaving, Alexei encountered six schoolboys who were throwing rocks at one of the boys named Ilyusha. The reason was because Ilyusha stabbed a classmate with a penknife. When Alexei went to defend him, he got bitten in return for defending him. The boy hated Alexei because Dmitri humiliated his father by dragging him out of the tavern by his beard after telling everyone about how much money they owed people and not having enough money to pay anyone back.
