What was the name of the fictional town in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov?

The fictional town in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is Skotoprigonyevsk.

The novel is set primarily in this unnamed-looking provincial Russian town, where the Karamazov family’s conflicts unfold. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, his sons Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei, and the servant Smerdyakov are connected by the town’s social and legal world.

Skotoprigonyevsk is fictional, but the novel’s setting draws on Dostoevsky’s knowledge of Russian provincial life. The town provides a compact community in which rumors, religious questions, family tensions, and the murder investigation quickly become interconnected.

Readers sometimes answer Saint Petersburg because it is central to many Dostoevsky novels. The Brothers Karamazov, however, is chiefly associated with this fictional provincial town.