CHARLES, as promissed, I am writing the following, selected from ENCARTA Encyclopedia.

"Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich (1821-81), Russian novelist, one of the greatest of all novelists, who penetrated the human mind and heart with exceptional insight and whose fiction has had profound influence on the modern intellectual climate. Born in Moscow on November 11, 1821, Dostoyevsky was the son of a former army doctor. He had a gloomy childhood....... Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor in Siberia and to serve afterward as a common soldier. The stresses of this period brought on epilepsy, from which Dostoyevsky suffered the rest of his life.... His reading, limited to the Bible, led to the rejection of the Western-inspired atheistic socialism of his youth. Christ's teachings became for him the supreme affirmation of the ethical ideal and of the possibility of salvation through suffering. The brutality of the hardened criminals, alternating with displays of courage, generosity, and sensitive feelings, deepened the writer's insight into the complexity of human behavior.... In Crime and Punishment, probably his best-known work, a poor student, Raskolnikov, commits murder to rid the world of a human parasite and to help his indigent family; but his main motive is the testing of his right as an extraordinary individual (as he conceives himself to be) to transgress moral law. Tormented by guilt and isolation, he confesses and is spiritually redeemed.... The Brothers Karamazov, considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, is the most powerful artistic expression of Dostoyevsky's psychological insights and philosophical and religious views. It is plotted as a gripping murder mystery; concerned with the tragedy of patricide... The three protagonists-metaphysical symbols of body, mind, and spirit of the modern human being-engage in passionate debate, revolving around themes considered in the author's earlier works: the expiation of sin through suffering, the need for a moral force in an irrational universe, the struggle between good and evil, the supreme value of the individual and freedom. The ultimate question is raised of how one is to live and what one is to live by-to which only fragmentary answers are given."

This was his terrible problem, Charles: he did not know how to 'live,' because of his fragmented (schizoid) 'soul,' mind, unconscious.
But the main point is that the interpretation given by the encyclopedist on the brothers is wrong! The three brothers Karamazov are actually the different components of his own psyche, debating, among others, his ambivalent feelings toward his dead father. He developed a psychosomatic epilepsy. During the seizures' unconscious period, he enjoyed deeply giving free rein to fantasies that had been strugging to appear openly. His great 'happiness' caused by the seizures was due to unconscious fantasies of murdering his father, and probably of killing to rob for his gaming sickness. He was thus 'free of guilt' and 'omnipotent.'

"The symbolic creation of worlds where heroes, pervaded by the tragic sense of life, search for truth and self-fulfillment endows the novels of Dostoyevsky's last creative period with a timeless and universal quality. Dostoyevsky anticipated modern psychology by his exploration of hidden motives and intuitive understanding of the unconscious, manifested in the irrational behavior, psychic suffering, dreams, and lapses into insanity of his characters..."