Who the hell is von sohn in the brothers karamazov?

The Von Sohn affair was among a number of crimes which afflicted

Russian society in the 1870s. Von Sohn, an old bureaucrat,

was a victim of a notorious murder in St.Petersburg in 1869. He was "enticed

into a brothel where he was poisoned, robbed, chopped into pieces

and sent to Moscow" in a trunk.

Fyodor Pavlovitch's vivid interest in the Von Sohn affair - contemporaneous with the events of the novel tends to link him with the dead Von Sohn. Both Fyodor Pavlovitch and Von Sohn are debauchers and sensualists; both are about sixty; both, apparently, have money and are willing to spend it on young harlots.

MAXIM D. SHRAYER "METAMORPHOSES OF 'BEZOBRAZIE' IN

DOSTOEVSKIJ'S THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV:

MAKSIMOV-VON SOHN-KARAMAZOV" Russian Literature XXXVII (1995) 93-108

North-Holland