The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), Fyodor Dostoevsky's last, longest, and one of his most famous novels, engages readers with timeless moral and philosophical questions about sin, retribution, compassion, and mercy. The book, which the author himself defined as 'a novel about blasphemy and its refutation,' was an attempt to 'resolve the question of man,' to 'unravel the mystery' of man, which, for Dostoevsky, meant 'resolving the question of God.' Through the prism of a detective story about the brutal murder of the head of the provincial Karamazov family, the author narrates the eternal struggle between the Divine and the diabolical in the human soul. One of the most profound reflections of Christian consciousness in world literature, The Brothers Karamazov has become the object of paradoxical philosophical and psychoanalytic interpretations in the 20th century.