This period also witnessed the rise of radical political movements, including the People's Will, which assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the year Dostoevsky died. The abolition of serfdom was but one consequence of the influence of Western European philosophies of liberalism and socialism on Russian society. The 1860s were a volatile period in Russian intellectual history. (To be more precise, if the novel is set "thirteen years" before its publication, as the narrator tells us, this places the time of the novel around 1866.) By setting the novel in a provincial town rather than an urban setting, Dostoevsky can explore how the abolition of serfdom transforms social relations across different classes, from the peasants to the landed aristocracy. The Brothers Karamazov is set in the tumultuous years following Russia's abolition of serfdom in 1861.
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