“General silence. Everyone’s eyes turned again to Stavrogin and Verkhovensky. ‘Verkhovensky, you have nothing to announce?’ the hostess asked directly. ‘Absolutely nothing,’ he stretched in his chair and yawned. ‘However, I would like a glass of cognac.’ ‘Stavrogin, what about you?’ ‘No thank you, I don’t drink.’ ‘I’m not talking about cognac, but whether you want to speak or not.’ ‘Speak? About what?’ ‘You’ll be brought some cognac,’ she replied to Verkhovensky.”
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Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.