The Mothers Karamazov

IN THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOVDostoevsky offers one of the great paternal portraits in world literature. Fedor Pavlovich Karamazov dominates the novel: he is the great elemental force at its center, the mystery of the seed in the Gospel of John, the “evil urge” without which no life is possible. This last novel is so obviously an exploration of the question of fatherhood that the reader may be excused for forgetting that the Karamazov brothers had mothers—two, and possibly even three, of them. Adelaida Ivanovna, Sofia Ivanovna, and Lizaveta Smerdiashchaia are long dead by the time the novel’s action begins;