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Continuing the Writing Life In 1868, Leo Tolstoy had finished his epic novel, War and Peace. Readers and critics loved the book. Dostoevsky, inspired and perhaps also envious, began to consider writing an epic of his own. He wanted to write a grand book, even longer than Tolstoy's, that would give him room to express his philosophies regarding the spiritual dilemmas of the modern Russian man. This epic - first titled Atheism and later The Great Sinner - was to be "the story of a Russian skeptic who, after many years of moving back and forth among all sorts of theologies and popular sects, in the end finds the Russian Orthodox religion and the Russian soul" (quoted from Grossman's biography). The Great Sinner was originally designed to contain five volumes, connected by one hero. The five books would eventually be distilled down to one: Brothers Karamazov. However, before Brothers Karamazov could come to be, Dostoevsky had one more important novel to write. In December, 1869, when he was still in Europe contemplating his plan for The Great Sinner, Dostoevsky read, with great moral shock, about the Ivanov murder in Moscow. Ivanov had been a student at the Agricultural Academy and was a member of an underground group, the Society of the Axe. The group consisted of disciples of the terrorist Mikhail Bakunin, the Geneva leader of the Russian revolution. Chief disciple of Bakunin and head of the Moscow branch was Sergei Nechaev, with whom Ivanov had ideological differences. The two opposed each other at the group's secret meetings, and Ivanov went so far as to threaten to form his own group. For this insurrection, Nechaev secretly ordered Ivanov's death. One evening in November, 1869, five members of the Society of the Axe ambushed Ivanov, murdered him, and threw his body into a pond. Dostoevsky immediately saw in this story the seeds for a novel about a philosophical murder - in short, a murder motivated not by money or by passion, but by ideas. On trial was not simply Nechaev, but the revolutionary ideology of Bakunin. Bakunin was not simply calling for revolution; he was calling for revolution of the most violent sort. He was not content to ask his followers to overthrow the systems of oppression that existed outside of them; he also expected them to overthrow the systems of oppression that worked from within - including love and brotherhood. To Bakunin, these brotherly feelings were as dangerous to the revolution as the Tsar himself. They were to be overcome by any means - including hatred, violence, and murder. The hero of the revolution would be one whose intellect dominated and consumed all - including his own emotions and spirit. Dostoevsky attended the trial when he returned to Russia in 1871. For Dostoevsky, Nechaev's trial took on personal significance, calling for judgment of his own revolutionary past and of prevailing revolutionary philosophies. Dostoevsky would pursue this judgment first in Demons -- where he satirizes and then tragically lampoons the revolutionary ideas of his era -- and later in Brothers Karamazov, in which he holds up these ideas - and, indeed, all of Russia - for spiritual judgment. Read on: Brothers Karamazov 
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