Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, and Epilepsy

Abstract

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a brilliant nineteenth-century Russian novelist who had a seizure disorder that influenced his life and his creativity. His novels explore issues of love, faith, doubt, morality and reflect his personal experience with epilepsy. He was a keen observer of familial psychodynamics. The Brothers Karamazov (1880)was Dostoyevsky’s longest and last novel, completed just a few months before his death from a pulmonary hemorrhage, most likely related to his life-long habit of cigarette smoking. In this novel, he explores the subtility of interpersonal relationships and the psychopathology within the Karamazov family and how one of the three brothers, Smerdyakov, uses psychogenic non-epileptic seizures as an alibi to get away with the perfect crime of patricide.