The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...

Raskolnikov commits murder. He then must deal both with the police, and his own guilty conscience. Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost...

The Idiot, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's masterpiece about a wayward, pure soul's reintegration into society, updated by Kurosawa to capture Japan's postwar aimlessness, was a victim of studio interference and public indifference. Today, this "folly" looks ever more fascinating.