Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov can certainly be read as a novel in the detective, ideological, or psychological genres, but it is as a spiritual novel that it can most comprehensively be understood. The book has its detective elements, to be sure, but the reader can be told that it is Smerdyakov who murdered old Karamazov, and that reader's enjoyment of the novel will not be much diminished, if at all. The book certainly qualifies as an ideological work as well, with such prominent battles over ideas as the Inquisitor's scene in which the cynic Ivan is pitted against the idealist Alyosha. And the novel is full of psychological conflict as the brothers, their father, and most other characters exhibit layers and layers of psychological conflict and detail. But it is finally as a spiritual novel that the secondary elements of these other genres are brought together and make sense. Dostoyevsky and the reader are off on a spiritual journey, a journey of rebirth, beginning with mention of the death of the father, and ending with the celebration of the resurrection and the joyous affirmation of life and Life Eternal by Alyosha.
Dostoyevsky in the first paragraph of the book writes that Fyodor Karamazov was "a landowner well known in our district
. . . and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death" (3). And on the last page of the book, after an incredible and arduous journey through the interwoven and often tragic lives of the members of this family, we read of Alyosha's affirmative conclusions and ultimate acceptance of all that has come before and all that is yet to come:
Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened! . . . Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner. Don't be put out at our eating pancakes---it's a very old custom and there's something nice in that! . . . Well, let us go...