How The Brothers Karamazov drew on Les Misérables
A documented line of influence: Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrably engaged Victor Hugo’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo · 1862
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
The Age of the NovelRelevance
6/10
On The Brothers Karamazov’s page
- Behind Zosima's mercy and the courtroom's reckoning stands Hugo: Dostoevsky prefaced the Russian Les Misérables and named its theme the great idea of the century
- The restoration of the fallen person — crushed by circumstance, redeemed through suffering — is the frame Karamazov inherits and deepens
- Read Les Misérables first and you see the social-justice and grace that Dostoevsky carried into a darker, more interior key
On Les Misérables’s page
- Dostoevsky wrote the preface to the 1862 Russian translation of Les Misérables, calling Hugo's idea — the restoration of the fallen person, crushed by circumstance and prejudice — the fundamental thought of all 19th-century art
- He reread Hugo across his whole career, and that conviction runs straight into The Brothers Karamazov
- Hugo's machinery of social injustice and redemption-through-suffering becomes the moral engine of Dostoevsky's last novel