Albert Einstein was not only the greatest physicist of the 20th century. He was also a voracious reader with fiercely held literary opinions. When asked to name his favorite book, he repeatedly chose the same answer: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. “Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss,” Einstein once wrote to a friend. Coming from the man who revolutionized our understanding of space, time, and gravity, that is an extraordinary statement.
The connection between a theoretical physicist and a 19th-century Russian novelist may seem unlikely. But Einstein’s love of Dostoevsky reveals something important about the way great scientific minds work. Physics does not emerge in a vacuum. It is shaped by philosophical questions, moral intuitions, and a deep engagement with the full range of human experience. Einstein’s reading life was as essential to his thinking as his mathematics.
What Einstein Read
Einstein’s literary tastes were wide and serious. He read philosophy (Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Hume, Kant), popular science, and classic literature in several languages. But certain authors recurred throughout his life with particular intensity:
- Fyodor Dostoevsky: Einstein’s favorite. He read The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. He called Dostoevsky “a great religious writer” who explored moral questions with unmatched depth.
- Baruch Spinoza: The 17th-century philosopher whose pantheistic vision of God as identical with nature deeply influenced Einstein’s own religious views. “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” Einstein famously said.
- Arthur Schopenhauer: Einstein admired Schopenhauer’s pessimism and his analysis of the will. He kept a bust of Schopenhauer in his study.
- Cervantes: Einstein loved Don Quixote for its combination of idealism and humor.
- Hume and Kant: Their philosophical works on the nature of knowledge and perception directly influenced Einstein’s thinking about space and time.
Why The Brothers Karamazov?
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is Dostoevsky’s final and greatest novel. It tells the story of three brothers (the intellectual Ivan, the spiritual Alyosha, and the sensual Dmitri) and their troubled relationship with their father, Fyodor Pavlovich, whose murder becomes the novel’s central event. Around this plot, Dostoevsky constructs a vast exploration of faith, reason, free will, suffering, and the existence of God.
The novel’s most famous chapter, “The Grand Inquisitor,” is a parable told by Ivan to Alyosha. In it, Christ returns to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, who explains that the Church has improved on Christ’s message by removing the burden of freedom from humanity. People do not want freedom, the Inquisitor argues. They want bread, miracles, and authority. Christ listens in silence and then kisses the old man on the lips.
It is one of the most powerful passages in all of literature, and it is easy to see why it would appeal to Einstein. The chapter raises questions about the relationship between freedom and authority, between individual conscience and institutional power, questions that Einstein confronted throughout his life as a scientist, a pacifist, and a refugee from Nazi Germany.
Moral Questions and Scientific Ones
Einstein once said that he was drawn to physics by “the same sort of feeling” that draws people to religion: a sense of wonder at the order and beauty of the universe, combined with a desire to escape the “merely personal.” Dostoevsky’s novels explore this tension between the personal and the universal with an intensity that few other writers have matched.
The Brothers Karamazov asks whether morality can exist without God, whether suffering has meaning, and whether human reason is sufficient to understand the world. These are not scientific questions, but they are the questions that frame the scientific enterprise. A physicist who believes that the universe is rationally ordered (as Einstein did) is making a philosophical commitment that is not so different from Alyosha Karamazov’s faith that the world is ultimately meaningful.
Dostoevsky and the Problem of Determinism
There is a deeper connection between Dostoevsky and Einstein that is rarely discussed. Both were preoccupied with the question of determinism: whether human actions (or physical events) are determined by prior causes or whether genuine freedom exists.
Dostoevsky’s characters are defined by their struggle with this question. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment tries to act as if he is free from moral constraints and discovers that he cannot. The Underground Man insists on his freedom precisely because it is irrational. Ivan Karamazov’s intellectual rejection of God leads to madness because he cannot bear the moral consequences of a universe without meaning.
Einstein, for his part, believed in strict physical determinism. “God does not play dice,” he famously said, rejecting the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. He believed that the universe follows exact, deterministic laws, even if we cannot always predict specific outcomes. This put him at odds with Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen school, a disagreement that lasted the rest of his life.
Reading Dostoevsky alongside Einstein’s physics reveals a shared obsession: both were grappling with the question of whether the universe is ultimately lawful or chaotic, meaningful or absurd. They reached different conclusions (Dostoevsky through faith, Einstein through physics), but the question drove them both.
Einstein’s Other Literary Connections
Einstein’s engagement with literature was not merely recreational. It shaped his scientific thinking in concrete ways.
His reading of David Hume‘s Treatise of Human Nature directly influenced the development of special relativity. Hume’s argument that our concepts of space and time are based on sensory experience, not on absolute truths, helped Einstein question the Newtonian assumption of absolute simultaneity. Without Hume, Einstein later said, he might never have arrived at the insight that simultaneity is relative.
Ernst Mach‘s philosophical critique of Newtonian mechanics similarly pushed Einstein toward the revolutionary ideas of general relativity. Mach argued that Newton’s “absolute space” was a metaphysical fiction, a claim that Einstein took seriously and that informed his geometric theory of gravity.
Even Spinoza’s philosophical vision of a universe governed by a single, unified substance contributed to Einstein’s lifelong search for a unified field theory, a single mathematical framework that would encompass all physical forces.
What Great Scientists Read
Einstein is not the only scientist whose reading life illuminated his work. Newton was deeply engaged with theology and alchemy. Darwin read Malthus and found the mechanism of natural selection. Schrödinger wrote What Is Life? after reading extensively in philosophy and biology. The idea that science operates in isolation from the humanities is a modern myth. The greatest scientists have always drawn on the full range of human thought.
For those who want to explore the primary works of the scientists whose ideas were shaped by reading, Kronecker Wallis offers beautifully crafted editions of the texts that changed the world. Einstein’s own Relativity: The Special and General Theory presents his revolutionary ideas in his own words, accessible to general readers. Newton’s Principia, the book that defined the physics Einstein eventually transformed, remains one of the most important scientific works ever written.
And for a visual journey through the faces behind the science, from the thinkers Dostoevsky wrote about to the physicists Einstein debated, the Portraying Science collection presents four centuries of scientific portraits in a single, stunning volume.
“Dostoevsky Gives Me More Than Gauss”
Einstein’s love of Dostoevsky is a reminder that the life of the mind is not divided into neat categories. The same person who derived E=mc2 found his deepest inspiration in a Russian novel about brothers, a murdered father, and the question of whether God exists. The same mind that saw the curvature of spacetime also saw the moral landscape of The Brothers Karamazov and recognized it as a map of something real.
Science tells us how the universe works. Literature tells us what it means to live in it. Einstein needed both, and the fact that he ranked a novelist above a mathematician says something profound about the kind of understanding he was searching for. It was not enough to describe the universe. He wanted to understand why it mattered.
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