Dostoyevsky's universe in The Brothers Karamazov, albeit as teeming and as robust and as religious as the one dramatized in Les Misérables, differs sharply from Hugo's in its essential thematic meaning.

The Brothers Karamazov, as its title indicates, tells the story of (four) brothers and their antagonistic—ultimately murderous—relationship with their despicable father.

The essence of the story is as follows: Alyosha Karamazov, a young disciple of the saintly Christian monk, Father Zossima, is instructed by the elder to attempt to resolve the dispute between his father and his older brother, Dmitri. Alyosha is unsuccessful at reconciling the two, regarding either Dmitri's inheritance or the jealous rivalry over the young coquette, Grushenka. Dmitri threatens to kill the old man rather than allow him to possess Grushenka. Karamozov's other legitimate son, Ivan, is an atheistic intellectual, and the bastard Smerdyakov is his philosophical protégé. When Dmitri can't find Grushenka, he rushes to his father's house, sees she isn't there, but badly beats a servant who tries to stop him. Shortly after, Dmitri and Grushenka are united, but Dmitri is arrested for the murder of his father. Ivan discovers that Smerdyakov is the killer, but, overcome by his own guilt, goes mad. Smerdyakov commits suicide. Dmitri is convicted. Alyosha, having had no success at sharing Father Zossima's message of love with adults, is able to bring it successfully to the children.

Such a distilled summary reduces the conflict to seven key figures—the four brothers, the father, Zossima and Grushenka—and a limited range of highly-essentialized actions.

Now the questions can be raised: What is the main conflict? Who are the crucial antagonists? Whose goals dominate the story? Who is struggling against whom, and for what?

What does the story show us? A murder.

By whom? Smerdyakov.

But is he the only one responsible? No.

Examine the central situation Dostoyevsky presents to us: Dmitri and the old man locked in a death struggle over Grushenka; she, a tease, actively encourages it; Alyosha, seeing disaster coming, tries to avert it, but not trying hard enough, fails utterly; Ivan, refusing to be his brother's keeper—or his father's—claims that without immortality all actions are permissible; and Smerdyakov, the cynical lackey, taking these words to heart, puts them into practice.

The conflict is, in part, Dmitri versus Karamazov over Grushenka; it is also, in part, Alyosha's earnest but unsuccessful attempt to bring Father Zossima's message of kindness to his warring family members; it is also, in part, Ivan's inciting a senseless murder, then his struggle to come to terms with his own culpability; it is also Smerdyakov's pulling the trigger for no reason other than to show that in a world without God there are no constraints on his whims.

This is an enormously complex conflict, intimately involving all five members of the Karamazov clan. (Grushenka is a secondary figure, because though a flirtatious coquette, she is not fundamental to the seething familial conflict.) The responsibility for the murder lies exclusively within the brothers Karamazov. Their joint responsibility for murder is the essence of the novel's action and the reason for the title.

Examine the combination of players Dostoyevsky brings together: the two crude sensualists, Karamazov and Dmitri, bent on a collision course; the intellectual, Ivan, who indifferently observes that "the one beast will devour the other"; the whim-driven flunky, Smerdyakov, a third beast who murders the first before the second can do it; and the ineffectual monk, Alyosha, who sees the murder coming but is too weak to take the actions to prevent it.

What, in essential terms, has Dostoyevsky shown us? The story of four brothers each, in his own way, responsible for the murder of their vicious father: One brother commits the murder—Smerdyakov; a second brother desires it—Dmitri; a third provides the moral justification for it—Ivan; and the fourth recognizes its imminence but is unwilling to stop it—Alyosha.

This understanding gives us Dostoyevsky's plot-theme: The actions of four brothers, in varying ways, lead to the murder of their loathsome father.

This condensation enables us to understand the entire conflict by uniting it around a thread that runs all through it: the four brothers, distinct and separate in so many ways, are united in their responsibility for the murder. There is the sensualist, the intellectual, the nihilist and the monk—men as varied as can be found—brought together by their mutual complicity.

Their shared guilt exists at three levels: the moral/practical, the psychological/existential and the metaphysical/theological. To take them one at a time, starting with the level of personal moral responsibility:

Dmitri, despite being neither the trigger-man nor the intellectual instigator, is the prime mover of the crime. It is his out-of-control, volatile use of force that not only gives Smerdyakov a convenient fall guy but, more fundamentally, establishes a context of violence against the old man, creating a situation ripe for murder.

Ivan, with his belief that the absence of immortality makes all things permissible, not only gives a moral sanction to the murderer but, more: his own secret desire to be rid of his father motivates him to leave town, thereby providing the murderer with an opportunity.

Alyosha, though kind-hearted and loving, is far too passive in his attempt to prevent the crime. He is certain disaster is coming—but when he fails to convince Ivan to stay, he does not leave the monastery to live at his father's house himself, thereby giving the murderer a clear shot at his intended victim. His lack of protective action at the decisive moment may show that he, like Ivan, at the subconscious level, wants to be rid of the despicable old man. He is certainly not prepared to go the distance in preventing the crime; this despite Father Zossima's insistent exhortation that he devote himself to his family's problems.

Smerdyakov, the cynical lackey, murders his own father for no better reason than a capricious whim, the desire to corroborate the nihilistic belief that "all actions are morally permissible." His motive is not even a Peter Keating (a character in Atlas Shrugged, later to be addressed) style of fawning—a desire to win points from his philosophical mentor—but one that is infinitely worse: all-out destructiveness, based not on hatred of the good but on indifference to everything; the man who holds nothing as sacred (or even valuable) brings about the ruin of his mentor, as well as that of himself and his older brother, plus the death of their father.

Dmitri, Ivan and Smerdyakov are guilty by the actions they take; Alyosha by virtue of the actions he doesn't. The responsibility of the first three is active; Alyosha's is passive. Theirs is a guilt of commission; his is one of omission.

The results of this guilt have devastating consequences either psychologically, existentially, or in both ways. Ivan lives out a deeply-held Dostoyevskian belief: the correlation of crime with sickness: he has visions of devils, he has a raging fever, and there is fear he is going mad. Smerdyakov commits suicide, as befitting a man with no values and nothing to live for. Dmitri is arrested, imprisoned and doomed to an escape that will exile him from the land and from the people whom he loves. He is overwhelmed with remorse at the realization that although he is not guilty of the crime, he is guilty. Alyosha must live with the realization that his failure to take decisive action violated not only his duty to his father but also, more significantly, his duty to his elder. For all four the consequences of guilt are dire: one dies, one goes mad, one is imprisoned, one must do better.

But it is the third, theological level of guilt that is critical to understanding the book's action and its theme. Karamazov and Dmitri are hardly the only self-indulgent hedonists who populate this story. There are hordes of background drinkers, gamblers, revelers, lechers and prostitutes, a thief (Dmitri), a killer (Smerdyakov), a coquette (Grushenka), a deeply-neurotic woman (Katerina), and there are endless acts of passion-driven violence. And over it all lies Father Zossima's sainthood, Alyosha's struggle to live by the elder's teachings, relentless protestations by the hedonists of their deep love for God, and the author's reverence for the ascetic holiness of the Russian monks.

What does it all mean? What does it add up to?

This is Christianity: the sinfulness of man; the lustful, bestial, violent desires that form the core of his nature and his motives; the purity of God; the on-the-brink, life-and-death desperation of the human condition in the absence of God; the need of suffering, of a soul howling from the abyss to gain redemption.

This is a picture of life and of man, not generically religious but specifically Christian. In contrast to Hugo this is not Religious Humanism, but pietistic, evil-stressing, Bible-thumping Christianity. We are all sinners, the story proclaims—not just the murderers, but all men, even Alyosha, who fails to consistently carry out Father Zossima's code; even Zossima himself, who insists that "each is responsible for the sins of all." We are all responsible; we are all sinners; we are all Karamazovs, as Alyosha discovers. Life for such a creature as man is endless, bloody conflict over who can scratch, snort, gorge, drink, belch, brawl and fornicate the most. It is violent, it is cynical, it is self-indulgent, it is criminal, it is desperate; ultimately, it is murderous.

This is the loathsome life and death of Fyodor Karamazov; of Smerdyakov and Dmitri; this is, as Dmitri puts it, the insect-like existence of reprobate man. This is, vividly dramatized, the theme of the novel.

To state the theme succinctly: the desperate condition of human existence in a world without God. In this novel, Dostoyevsky thunders against nineteenth-century positivism, determinism, materialism, atheism, against the dominant philosophical and scientific theories of his era.

This is Ivan's philosophy—thinking, questioning, doubting, seeking logical answers, finding none, rejecting God, living alone, despairing over evil, instigating a murder, brooding over his guilt, seeing devils, going mad. In the character of Ivan Karamazov, Dostoyevsky depicts and rejects Western rationalism. Ivan's fate shows the necessity of re-affirming Russian faith, Russian mysticism, Russian Christianity.

Modern Western man, Dostoyevsky proclaims, has rejected God; he scorns the commandments, embraces liberal permissiveness, believes "anything goes." "All actions are permissible," say the enlightened modern thinkers, thereby liberating violent emotionalists like Dmitri and cynical nihilists like Smerdyakov from all ethical constraints.

The result is violence and murder. The world becomes, in Dostoyevsky's words, "a vaudeville of devils."

Ivan's prose poem, "The Grand Inquisitor," is an eloquent example of Dostoyevsky's theme. In it, Jesus returns and is imprisoned by the Inquisition. You are guilty of condemning man to freedom, says the Grand Inquisitor to Christ. You rejected the temptation of Satan and set an example for man. You expect men to emulate you. But you are divine and can make that choice. They are sinful, insect-like men and cannot. The temptation is too much for them, and they fall. Few are capable of choosing the moral law and salvation. Most choose hedonic indulgence and Hell. Therefore, for man's good, the Church has been forced to enslave him, to end his freedom, to provide metaphysical law and order.

The Grand Inquisitor's enslavement of man (and his imprisonment of Christ) is justified only because man's sinful nature makes it impossible for all but a select few to choose God. Those few, like Father Zossima, can venture into the wilderness, face Satan and return stronger. The rest, according to the author, fall.

Man's sick soul was such that he had to reject God. The nineteenth-century intellectuals have declared, "God is dead!" Now, Dostoyevsky says, we are left with the question of the modern world: How do we live in a world without God?

The Brothers Karamazov provides a succinct answer: we don't.

In providing a Christian view of existence, Dostoyevsky's focus is on what you would expect a great novelist's to be: the nature of man. His primary characters dramatize a key principle of human nature.

Again, to take them one at a time: Alyosha struggles to live by Father Zossima's teachings, has doubts when God causes his mentor's corpse to decompose rapidly, yields to temptation (he too is a Karamazov), rushes to Grushenka's house, rights himself, but still does not carry though Zossima's teachings consistently. Ivan agonizes over the choice between fundamental alternatives: God or rationalism. He is ambivalent on the theism/atheism duality, but clearly rejects God's world, a realm where the innocent are unjustly condemned to suffer. He rejects the Christian belief that man is his brother's keeper and, by leaving town at the climactic moment, involves himself in the murder. Dmitri's agony is over a somewhat different issue, the choice of: honor versus base living, morality versus self-indulgent hedonism, God's laws versus the temptations of Satan. He falls repeatedly but, finally, his role in the murder of his father fills him with remorse and he is ready to choose another kind of life.

Dostoyevsky shows a fundamental alternative faced by man. He presents two polar opposites between which man must choose. They are: faith or disbelief. A man can choose God, like Father Zossima; or he can choose Satan, like Fyodor Karamazov; or he can choose God, then struggle with his wavering faith, like Alyosha; or he can choose to love God but follow the devil, condemning himself to the agonizing attempt to live a contradiction, like Dmitri; or he can abandon God not for pleasure but for logic, then find himself alienated from the good, driven inexorably to evil, then to madness, like Ivan.

In brief, man can choose God, Satan or some tortured attempt at combining the two. God or Satan are the fundamental alternatives, and man must choose between them. Volition is his nature; man is condemned to freedom, and his salvation depends on the right choice.

The inescapable necessity to choose and awareness of the momentous consequences explain the frenzied torment in which Dostoyevskian man exists: he knows God is good but is unable to resist lustful passion; then, he is tortured by alienation from God. The power to choose between God and temptation is the essence of human nature as depicted in The Brothers Karamazov.

God and Satan struggle, Dmitri observes, and their battlefield is the soul of man. Dmitri's assessment is literarily accurate. The battle lines between good and evil in The Brothers Karamazov are defined strictly on theological grounds, and Dostoyevsky's artistic genius weaves the theology into a literary fabric that provides a vivid, chilling depiction of a Christian view of man.

For Hugo, God is necessary to imbue the social order with kindness, with a gracious good-will of man to man. But for Dostoyevsky, God is necessary at a more fundamental personal level: to cleanse man's sick soul of sin. In Hugo's world, the problem is merely the social system's lack of benevolence; the great man, with God's aid, can fight this. But in Dostoyevsky's world, there are not—nor could there be—great men, only misshapen creatures screaming from the edge of the Pit. Hugo's man in Les Misérables needs God to make society more humane. Dostoyevskian man in The Brothers Karamazov needs God to cleanse his soul and spare his life. But whatever they disagree on, they concur on a fundamental belief: man needs God.

As we shall see, next, Ayn Rand's man in Atlas Shrugged needs no God.