Ryevsk, Russia, 1870. Tensions abound in the Karamazov family. Fyodor is a wealthy libertine who holds his purse strings tightly. His four grown sons include Dmitri, the eldest, an elegant officer, always broke and at odds with his father, betrothed to Katya, herself lovely and rich. The other brothers include a sterile aesthete, a factotum who is a bastard, and a monk. Family tensions erupt when Dmitri falls in love with one of his father's mistresses, the coquette Grushenka. Two brothers see Dmitri's jealousy of their father as an opportunity to inherit sooner. Acts of violence lead to the story's conclusion: trials of honor, conscience, forgiveness, and redemption.

A local handyman saves a child in a fire, but the burns he receives disfigure his face so much that the townspeople avoid him.

An American woman becomes ill in Europe, and she and her husband stay at a French Inn while she recuperates. They notice a small boy at the inn and learn that he is the grandson of the woman who owns the establishment. When they see that the child is ill-treated, they try to help him.