Professor Kozlowski looks at this sudden and seemingly-inexplicable tangent in Dostoevsky's storytelling: a diversion from the main story and characters to consider an otherwise unmet character, only partially-related to the secondary plot of the novel, three months after the (unjust?) arrest of Dmitri Karamazov.  Why does Dostoevsky make these choices, and why does our plot now rest on a thirteen- (two weeks from fourteen!)-year-old kid?

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