#russian philosopher

With regard to Dostoyevsky you can’t say: ‘I don’t care about him’. Everyone cares about Dostoyevsky, because no one can be indifferent to one’s soul

“ The Russian soul sits not in one spot, this is no small-place soul, no locale-bounded soul. In Russia, in the soul of the people there is a sort of endless searching, a searching for the invisible city of Kitezh, an home unseen. Distances open up before the Russian soul, and no traces of an horizon are there before its spiritual eyes. The Russian soul is ablaze in its fiery search for truth, for the absolute and Divine truth and for the salvation of all the world and the universal resurrection unto new life. It grieves eternally over the sorrow and suffering of the people and all the world, and its torment knows no solace. This soul is absorbed in finding resolution to the ultimate and accursedly difficult questions concerning the meaning of life. There is a rebellious and unsubmissive aspect within the Russian soul, not to be appeased nor satisfied by anything temporal, relative or conditional. All farther and farther along it has to go, to the very end, to the limit, to the exit point from "this world", from this earth, from everything merely local, narrow, attached to it.”

The Russian soul sits not in one spot, this is no small-place soul, no locale-bounded soul. In Russia, in the soul of the people there is a sort of endless searching, a searching for the invisible city of Kitezh, an home unseen. Distances open up before the Russian soul, and no traces of an horizon are there before its spiritual eyes. The Russian soul is ablaze in its fiery search for truth, for the absolute and Divine truth and for the salvation of all the world and the universal resurrection unto new life. It grieves eternally over the sorrow and suffering of the people and all the world, and its torment knows no solace. This soul is absorbed in finding resolution to the ultimate and accursedly difficult questions concerning the meaning of life. There is a rebellious and unsubmissive aspect within the Russian soul, not to be appeased nor satisfied by anything temporal, relative or conditional. All farther and farther along it has to go, to the very end, to the limit, to the exit point from “this world”, from this earth, from everything merely local, narrow, attached to it.

Dostoevsky even finds a sort of delight in telling us of his constant defeats and miseries. No one before him, and none since, has described with such desperate fullness all the humiliations, all the sufferings of a soul crushed by the weight of "self-evidence". He cannot rest until he has torn from himself this desperate confession: "Can a man who has looked into his own soul, really respect himself ?" Who can, in fact, respect weakness and triviality ?

Of all our [Russian] romantics, Dostoevsky was the most fanciful, the most transcendental, the most sincere.

Dostoevsky himself was uncertain, to the end of his life, whether he had really seen what he described in The Notes from Underground, or whether he had dreamed it, taking hallucinations and ghosts for reality. Hence the strange style of the underground man's story; this is why each of his sentences gives the lie to the one before and mocks it; this explains too its bursts of ecstasy, of inexplicable joy, alternating with fits of no less inexplicable despair. It is as though he has stumbled over a precipice and fallen sheer into an unplumbed abyss. An unexampled, joyous feeling of flight, combined with terror of the abyss, the all-engulfing void.

Read what Dostoevsky has to say about normal men, and then ask yourself which is better: the painful convulsions of a doubtful awakening, or the grey, yawning torpidity of certain sleep.

People go to philosophers for general principles... But what sense is there in them ? None at all. Nature demands individual creative activity from us. Men won't understand this, so they wait forever for the ultimate truths from philosophy. which they will never get...  The wise are no wiser than the stupid — they have only more conceit and effrontery. Every intelligent man laughs in his soul at "bookish" views. And are not books the work of the wise ? They are often extremely interesting — but only in so far as they do not contain general rules. Woe to him who would build up his life according to Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Schiller, or Dostoevsky. He must read them, but he must have sense, a mind of his own to live with.