THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV states and exemplifies Dostoevsky's most urgent concerns as a writer: the struggle between faith and the lack of it, the nature of love and hate, the question of God's existence, and generational conflict. The latter is represented in his novel by the father, Fyodor Karamazov, and his four very different sons: the saintly Alyosha, passionately sensual Dmitri, Ivan the intellectual, and the repulsive bastard son, Smerdyakov, who eventually becomes the murderer of his cruel father. All four sons, however, hate him, and the question of guilt is ambiguous. It has been theorized that Dostoyevski's hatred for his own father was the springboard for this examination of patricide and guilt.