Fyodor Dostoevsky

1821-1881 · Russian · Existentialism, Moral Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Russian Religious Thought, Literature

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

In December 1849, Dostoevsky was tied to a post before a firing squad in Semyonovsky Square. The execution was a Tsarist hoax, but the terror remade him. Four years of Siberian labor among convicts whose faith moved him ended his belief in Western rationalism. What returned from Siberia was a writer with a different philosophy.

Topics Fyodor Dostoevsky addresses

• the Underground Man
• rational egoism and its refusal
• spite and self-laceration
• the man of heightened consciousness
• 2 x 2 = 5
• determinism and the stone wall
• the extraordinary man
• the Grand Inquisitor
• the return of the ticket
• children's tears and the price of harmony
• theodicy and the problem of evil
• the rebellion of Ivan
• Father Zosima and active love
• the holy elder
• eschatological imagination
• the ideological novel
• the idea as idea-force
• polyphony
• Kirillov and suicide as proof of freedom
• Stavrogin and demonic possession
• the god-bearing people
• pochvennichestvo
• the Russian Idea
• vsechelovechnost

Converse with Fyodor Dostoevsky on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Fyodor Dostoevsky's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.