The Grand Inquisitor & The House of the Dead

"The Grand Inquisitor" is a poem (a story within a story) inside Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880). It is recited by Ivan Karamazov, who questions the possibility of a personal and benevolent God, to his brother Alexei (Alyosha), a novice monk. "The Grand Inquisitor" is an important part of the novel and one of the best-known passages in modern literature because of its ideas about human nature and freedom, and its fundamental ambiguity.

Scholars cite Friedrich Schiller's play Don Carlos (1787) as a major inspiration for Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, while also noting that "The sources of the legend are extraordinarily varied and complex."

The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1860–2 in the journal Vremya by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp. The novel has also been published under the titles Memoirs from the House of The Dead, Notes from the Dead House (or Notes from a Dead House), and Notes from the House of the Dead. The book is a loosely-knit collection of facts, events and philosophical discussion organised by "theme" rather than as a continuous story. Dostoevsky himself spent four years in exile in such a camp following his conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle. This experience allowed him to describe with great authenticity the conditions of prison life and the characters of the convicts.