When The Brothers Karamazov was serialized in the Russian Herald in 1879 and 1880, it won high praise, and finally earned Dostoevsky enough to pay off his debts for the first time. He considered the novel his greatest work, and critics have generally echoed this sentiment over the past century and more. Although Dostoevsky died just a few months after the completion of the novel, at the height of his acclaim, his reputation in Russia declined in the generation after his death, and his international reputation had to wait decades to become established. The Brothers Karamazov was first translated into English by Constance Garnett in 1912; other translations have since been published. The first English publication of "The Grand Inquisitor" as a separate short story did not appear until the 1930s.

The story has tended to divide critics sharply. The first important English-language piece of criticism of "The Grand...