Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical discourse. The unruly landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons – the atheistic intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitri, and the devout novice Alexei – are all involved in some way. Closely tied to this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, and the catastrophic consequences of rationalism. The novel is also rich in comedy: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the author's most cherished beliefs and concerns are presented with a touch of irreverence, so that orthodoxy and radicalism, reason and madness, love and hate, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West regarded it as "the.".