His final and greatest work, Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published serially in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Set against a modernizing 19th-century Russia, the characters experience moral struggles of faith, judgment, and reason amid a patricidal murder which forms the center of the plot. The novel is full of ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. Dostoyevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, a spa town celebrated for its mineral springs and which inspired the main setting. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
