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First published under the title Dostojewski und die Vatertötung as a preface to Die Urgestalt der Brüder Karamasoff (1928), and reprinted in the Gesammelte Schriften, XII, pp. 7–26, this paper is an analysis of Dostoevski's unconscious parricidal wishes deduced by Freud from fragmentary autobiographical data and from the attitudes inherent in his philosophy and writings. Freud points out the likelihood that Dostoevski's epileptiform seizures were psychogenic in etiology, representing his identification with his murdered father. The fact that he submitted to unjust punishment at the hands of the Czar without complaint is adduced as evidence pointing toward his sense of guilt and need for punishment at the hands of a father substitute. Further proof of this sense of guilt is found in Dostoevski's gambling which was a masturbatory equivalent entailing constant concomitant castrative punishment. Finally, it is in his major work, The Brothers Karamazov, that Freud finds the most conclusive evidence. He calls this Dostoevski's confession through identification with the father murderer.