Dostoyevsky was the son of an impoverished nobleman of Lithuanian origin. born in 1821 in Moscow, where his father held the post of resident doctor at a charity hospital. The family had small living quarters on the hospital grounds, and Fyodor became acquainted at an early age with misery, misfortune and death. Doctor Dostoyevsky, authoritarian and morose, believed in old fashioned discipline and strict religious upbringing, and Fyodor's childhood was a rather depressing one. He lost his mother at 16, at which age he was entered in the School of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg. In the extraordinary world in which the sublime and the melodramatic, the pathological and the sound, the intuitive and the cerebral are blended in a unique amalgam, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky's last novel, occupies a place all its own. Written when he was almost sixty and published in 1880, shortly before his death, it is not only the most mature and complete of his great works but undoubtedly also one of the most representative, since it sums up all his ideas and typifies all the achievements of his art. The Brothers Karamazov encompasses a variety of characters from many strata of Czarisrt society ... aristocrats, serfs, monks, women of the people, intellectuals, officials which offers a veritable panorama of Russian life in the late 19th century.