“When they became wicked, they started to talk about brotherhood and humaneness and understood these ideas. When they became criminals, they invented justice and lay down complete codes of law to maintain it, and to secure these codes they erected a guillotine. They remembered only a tiny bit of what they had lost; they didn’t even want to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They even laughed at the possibility of this former happiness of theirs and called it a dream.”
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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.