The Karamazov household and the town around it.
The Brothers Karamazov has a large cast spread across four parts: the Karamazov family itself, the monastery and its monks, the women around Dmitri, the lawyers and officials of the trial, and the children of Book 10. The novel’s centre is the household — father, three sons, one servant — but Dostoevsky populates an entire provincial town around it.
A drunken landowner in his late fifties. Father of Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha, and very likely Smerdyakov. Abandoned all four. Competing with Dmitri for Grushenka, refusing Dmitri his inheritance, and performing his buffoonery for any available audience. Found dead in his locked study the morning after Dmitri’s wild night through town.
Former army officer, twenty-eight, chronically in debt. Engaged to Katerina Ivanovna; obsessed with Grushenka. Has been demanding his inheritance loudly enough for the whole town to hear. On the murder night, he is in the garden of his father’s house with a brass pestle, looking through the window. He runs. The case against him is built from this and from everyone who heard his threats.
Middle brother, twenty-three. Has come home for reasons he cannot fully articulate. Delivers Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor to Alyosha in a tavern. Has been meeting Smerdyakov in the evenings and not telling himself why. Leaves town the day before the murder after a final exchange he replays obsessively afterward. His mental collapse — three interviews with Smerdyakov, the fever, the hallucinated devil — occupies Book 11.
Youngest brother, twenty, novice at the monastery. Named for Dostoevsky’s dead son. Called the hero of the novel in its opening sentence. Devoted to Father Zosima, constitutionally unable to judge. After Zosima’s death and the body’s decay, goes outside at midnight and kisses the earth — the novel’s reply to Ivan. Appears in almost every thread of the novel as its mobile moral centre.
Likely illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovich by the mute Lizaveta, raised as servant cook in his father’s kitchen. Epileptic, fastidious, contemptuous of everyone. Has been reading Ivan’s journalism and meeting with him evenings. Suffers a seizure on the cellar stairs the night of the murder. His three interviews with Ivan in Book 11 deliver the truth in escalating stages. Dies by his own hand before the trial ends.
The revered monk to whom Alyosha is attached. Dying from the opening chapters; dead by the middle of the novel. His teachings, recorded in Book 6, are Dostoevsky’s most sustained statement of Christian ethics: universal responsibility, active love, paradise already present. The test: his body decays after death, and the novel insists the teaching is true regardless.
A severe monk who keeps a competing standard of piety, fasting to the point of hallucination and seeing devils in others’ cells. His appearance after Zosima’s death — gloating over the decay — is the novel’s portrait of what piety becomes when it is pure performance.
A merchant’s mistress, about twenty-two, kept by the merchant Samsonov, locally notorious. Both Fyodor Pavlovich and Dmitri are consuming themselves over her; she holds this at a distance while waiting for the Polish officer who betrayed her five years ago. Transforms across the novel — the woman Dmitri finds at Mokroye is not the same woman described in the early gossip.
A proud and wealthy young woman, engaged to Dmitri, still obsessed with him even as she supports Ivan’s love. Her relationship with Dmitri is built on a mutual humiliation neither can let go of; her testimony at the trial destroys Dmitri not out of malice but out of the inability to stop being the person she has made herself into.
The teenage daughter of Madame Khokhlakova, partially disabled, sharp-tongued, in love with Alyosha in the way of someone who is not sure whether she wants him or wants to destroy what he represents. Her scenes with Alyosha are the novel’s most unsettling portraits of adolescent inner life.
A precocious, proud, deeply insecure boy of thirteen who has been feeding Ilyusha Karamazovian ideas at a child’s scale — telling him there is no God, that he can do what he likes. His friendship with Alyosha, and his bedside reconciliation with Ilyusha, is the novel’s portrait of what Ivan’s ideas produce at their youngest and most dangerous.
The nine-year-old son of a disgraced staff captain, sick and dying through all of Book 10. His relationship with his proud, humiliated father, and his reconciliation with the schoolboys at his bedside, is where the novel’s emotional argument finally lands. The speech at the stone over his grave is the last thing the novel says.