Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quote
What do you mean by isolation?' I asked him. 'Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age-it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. Fore every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fulness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fulness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realisation he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into unites, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What do you mean by isolation?' I asked him. 'Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age-it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. Fore every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fulness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fulness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realisation he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into unites, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them.
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About Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died of tuberculosis on 27 February 1837, when he was 15, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute (later renamed the Military Engineering-Technical University). After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s, he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into Saint Petersburg's literary circles. However, he was arrested in 1849 for belonging to a literary group, the Petrashevsky Circle, that discussed banned books critical of Tsarist Russia. Dostoevsky was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. In the following years, Dostoevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writer's Diary, a collection of his writings. He began to travel around Western Europe and developed a gambling addiction, which led to financial hardship. For a time, he had to beg for money, but he eventually became one of the most widely read and highly regarded Russian writers.
Dostoevsky's body of work consists of thirteen novels, three novellas, seventeen short stories, and numerous other works. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia, influencing an equally great number of later writers, including Russians such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov, the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and the emergence of Existentialism and Freudianism. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages, and served as the inspiration for many films.