Quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“I also once had a friend. But I was already a despot in my soul; I wanted to have unlimited power over his soul; I wanted to instill in him a contempt for his surrounding milieu; I demanded of him a haughty and final break with that milieu. I frightened him with my passionate friendship; I drove him to tears, to convulsions; he was a naive, self-giving soul; but once he had given himself wholly to me, I immediately started to hate him and pushed him away - as if I had needed him only to gain a victory over him, only to bring him into subjection. But I could not be victorious over everyone; my friend was also not like any of them, and represented the rarest exception.”
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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.