The précis of the novel at the top of this page states there are four Karamasov brothers. However that assumes a certain not uncontroversial reading. The narrator never explicitly states that Smerdyakov is Fyodor's son: it is offered rather as a possibility or a 'rumour' by the narrator. Readers may find it probable, but it remains unproven (even though, as Fetyukovitch would have it, it makes for a good romance). I'd suggest that it's part of the structure of the novel that there is always the shade of unreliability about the narrator's version of events. We're never quite allowed to be certain what happened by the window on the dark night of Dimitri's flight because we can only be certain about Smerdyakov's version of events as experienced by Ivan while we have a similar faith in Ivan's experience of the Devil's existence. Accept the Devil's existence, and then we also who know whodunnit, because we're implicitly accepting the narrative conventions of the genre, just as Alyosha would have us the 'narrative conventions' of theology: i.e., religion. But perhaps that's one fiction too far. Give back that ticket, as the rational Ivan urges, and you're left in a world without laws, be they narrative or moral, and perhaps without objective truth. That's a world where certainty of knowledge may not be attainable. That's a world in which all the certainties of narrative convention are usurped. And that's also a world in which there are Three Brothers Karamasov, not four.
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