The Brothers Karamazov

Raskolnikov's 'extraordinary man' theory prefigures Ivan's 'everything is permitted' — Dostoevsky rehearsing the same philosophical crisis in a shorter, sharper frame

Russia's other great 19th-century novel: equally vast, equally theological, but Tolstoy's answer (live simply, love the peasants, escape society) is the opposite of Dostoevsky's urban, polyphonic turbulence

Prince Myshkin is the failed Alyosha — another figure of pure goodness placed in a corrupt world, but without Alyosha's practical wisdom; destroyed by it

Kafka named Dostoevsky as his primary influence; K.'s conviction without discernible crime mirrors Dmitri's, but Kafka strips away the spiritual consolation and leaves only the bureaucratic horror

Camus explicitly built his absurdist project as a response to Ivan Karamazov — Meursault is what Ivan's rebellion looks like when you follow it to its human conclusion

Both novels use a specific dramatic story (murder / whale hunt) as a scaffold for encyclopedic philosophical investigation; both give the villain-intellectual the best speeches