“Here they are proposing to us, through various secret pamphlets of foreign manufacture, that we should join ranks and form small groups for the sole purpose of creating mass destruction, under the pretext that since you can’t treat the world, you can’t cure anything, and that if you’re radical enough to cut off a hundred million heads and thereby lighten your burden, you can jump across the ditch more confidently. A beautiful idea, no doubt,”
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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.