Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905-1980) born in Paris in 1905, studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1924 to 1929 and became Professor of Philosophy at Le Havre in 1931. With the help of a stipend from the Institut Français he studied in Berlin (1932) the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. After further teaching at Le Havre, and then in Laon, he taught at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris from 1937 to 1939. Since the end of the Second World War, Sartre has been living as an independent writer.

Sartre is one of those writers for whom a determined philosophical position is the centre of their artistic being. Although drawn from many sources, for example, Husserl's idea of a free, fully intentional consciousness and Heidegger's existentialism, the existentialism Sartre formulated and popularized is profoundly original. Its popularity and that of its author reached a climax in the forties, and Sartre's theoretical writings as well as his novels and plays constitute one of the main inspirational sources of modern literature. In his philosophical view atheism is taken for granted; the "loss of God" is not mourned. Man is condemned to freedom, a freedom from all authority, which he may seek to evade, distort, and deny but which he will have to face if he is to become a moral being. The meaning of man's life is not established before his existence. Once the terrible freedom is acknowledged, man has to make this meaning himself, has to commit himself to a role in this world, has to commit his freedom. And this attempt to make oneself is futile without the "solidarity" of others.

The conclusions a writer must draw from this position were set forth in "Qu'est-ce que la littérature?" (What Is Literature?), 1948: literature is no longer an activity for itself, nor primarily descriptive of characters and situations, but is concerned with human freedom and its (and the author's) commitment. Literature is committed; artistic creation is a moral activity.

While the publication of his early, largely psychological studies, L'Imagination (1936), Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Outline of a Theory of the Emotions), 1939, and L'Imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l'imagination (The Psychology of Imagination), 1940, remained relatively unnoticed, Sartre's first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), 1938, and the collection of stories Le Mur (The Wall and other Stories), 1938, brought him immediate recognition and success. They dramatically express Sartre's early existentialist themes of alienation and commitment, and of salvation through art.

His central philosophical work, L'Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943, is a massive structuralization of his concept of being, from which much of modern existentialism derives. The existentialist humanism which Sartre propagates in his popular essay L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946, can be glimpsed in the series of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom), 1945-49.

Sartre is perhaps best known as a playwright. In Les Mouches (The Flies), 1943, the young killer's committed freedom is pitted against the powerless Jupiter, while in Huis Clos (No Exit), 1947, hell emerges as the togetherness of people.

Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, where he also spent all his days. Kierkegarrd's surname derived from the name of a farmstead, where his ancestors once lived-a farm (gaard) located near the village church (kirke/kierke). He was the seventh and last child of his parents. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756-1838), the philopher's father, was a wool merchant. At age of forty, he had become so successful in the wool trade and with a fortunate investment that he was able to retire. In his poverty-stricken youth, Michael Pedersen had cursed God. Later he constantly thought of the sufferings of Christ. His first wife had died childless after two years of marriage; he then married his housekeeper Ane, who was already pregnant. At Søren's birth, Michael Pedersen was fifty-six. The father's melancholy, pietistic faith, thoughts of sin and grace had a deep effect on his son's the world view.

Kierkegaard was a very prolific writer. At his creative peak he published 12 books in 18 months (1843-44), using many pseudonyms, sometimes even satirizing his own books under a different name. Following his main theme, "subjectivity is truth," Kierkegaard explored his own subjectivity through different identities, going through the history of philosophy from Socrates to Hegel, whose philosophical system he labelled as comic. This effort has been compared with Balzac's La Comédie humaine, which comprehend the whole of society. Between 1842 and 1850 he wrote some 25 books. In only three months he wrote PHILOSOPHISKE SMULER (1844, Philosophical Fragments), under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus in reference to a monk who lived in the 7th century and wrote about Christian virtues. The book sold poorly, only 204 copies in three years. In 1837 Kierkegaard had called Hegel 'Johannes Climacus' alias 'De omnibus dubitantum est'. At the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard revealed himself as the author of his pseudonymous works.

Kierkegaard believed that the truth could be best revealed through dramatic confrontation of opposing habits of life – for example in the guise of a magistrate or a seducer as in ENTEN - ELLER: ET LIVS-FRAGMENT (1843, Either/Or), which he published under the name of Victor Eremita. The portrayal of the aesthetic way of life was partly based on his relationship with Regine Olsen. The first volume was devoted to the hedonistic or, as Kierkegaard calls it, the "aesthetic", life. The second volume, by a married "Judge William," presents an alternative: the reflective life. Kierkegaard's behavior toward Regine increased his feeling of guilt, which he studied in Concept of Dread (1844). There he introduced the idea of what, after the Second World War and the advent of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, became popular as angst. Sartre was a student of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger. The Spanish thinker, novelist, and poet Miguel Unamuno undertook the study of Danish in order to read Kirkegaard.

Neither Nietzsche nor Kierkegaard were systematic philosophers – they opposed such tendencies. Although Kierkegaard admitted that abstract, impersonal thinking has a certain value, life was not him mere logic. "I believe because it is absurd," was his famous conclusion. It is not enough to be a Christian, the unreflective church-goer must become a Christian. "Wisdom is passionless," wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in Culture and Value (1979). "But faith by contrast in what Kierkegaard calls a passion." Some philosophers have considered Kierkegaard's contribution to philosophy questionable, because of his reluctance to maintain any coherent stance. Kierkegaard himself has argued that in his oeuvre he has concentrated on the question of how to become a Christian. "If, after the Final Judgment, there remains only one sinner in Hell and I happen to be that sinner, I will celebrate from the abyss the Justice of God."

Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, was born September 26th, 1889, to Friedrich and Johanna Heiddeger, in the Black Forest region of Messkirch. He began gymnasium at Constance in 1903, but was later transferred, in 1906, to Bertholds gymnasium in Freiberg. Here, he boarded at the archiepiscopal seminary of St. Georg. Heidegger was impressed early on with Franz Brentano. A mentor, Dr. Conrad Grober, had given him a copy of Brentano's "On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle." This early exposure to Brentano, who influenced Husserl's phenomenology, and the Greeks, most likely set Heidegger on his path toward greatness as a 20th century philosopher.

In 1909, Heidegger entered the Society of Jesus at Tisis in Austria to study as a Jesuit. However, most likely for health reasons, his canditature was rejected. Instead, Heidegger entered into study for the priesthood at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiberg. At this time, Heidegger first began lecturing and publishing papers, and he was first exposed to Husserl's writings. For reasons that are unknown, Heidegger was directed by his superiors to change his path of study from theology to mathematics and philosophy. Heidegger took their advice, and, before long, had diligently read the works of Husserl and went on to complete his doctorate. Heidegger married his wife, Elfride Petri, in March, 1917. Shortly thereafter, Heidegger entered into the German army. He was promoted from private to corporal ten months later, but was soon discharged for health reasons. Shortly after the birth of his son, Jorg, in 1919, Heidegger, in a letter to a colleague, wrote that he had decided to break with "the dogmatic system of Catholicism."

In 1919, Heidegger became Edmund Husserl's assistant at Freiburg. There, he lectured and first met Karl Jaspers; from thereon, they would form a correspondence relationship for many years. During this time, Heidegger's second son, Hermann, was born. By 1924, Heidegger moved on to become an associate at the University of Marburg, where he would write his magnum opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). At Marburg, Heidegger also met Hannah Arendt, who would become his lover. Through his brilliant lectures at Marbug, Heidegger influenced many thinkers, including Herbert Marcuse, who would become a primary figure in Critical Theory. Through Count Kuki Shuzo, Jean-Paul Sarte was first introduced to the work of Heidegger. Shuzo would also become the first to offer a book-length study of Heidegger, "The Philosophy of Heidegger," published in Japan.

In 1933, Heidegger became the rector of the University of Freiburg. At this time, he also joined the National Socialist Party. One year later, Heidegger would resign as rector due to disputes with faculty and local Nazi officials. Up until 1945, Heidegger continued his involvement with the National Socialist Party, although the degree of his involvement is still under debate. Nevertheless, Heidegger officially broke with the National Socialist Party in 1945 -- however, despite the urgings of Marcuse and others, Heidegger never publically apologized for his involvement with National Socialism.

This shadow which hangs over the work of Heidegger is not something to be taken lightly, and any reader of Heidegger is urged to be mindful that Heidegger's philosophy does contain the possibility for a National Socialist perspective -- though it remains heatedly debated whether this is any reason to dispense with Heidegger's work altogether. In my opinion, Heidegger has too much to offer the world in his philosophy to cast him away, despite the dark-side of his politics. I believe it is possible to read and learn from Heidegger without either condoning or making light of his National Socialist affiliation. It is clear that Heidegger did suffer consequences for his National Socialist affiliation. With the denazification hearing in 1945, Heidegger was banned from teaching.

Heidegger suffered a nervous breakdown. One would like to think that Heidegger's breakdown involved a recognition of his guilt due to his, most likely passive, complicity with the evil deeds of the Nazi party. This may hold some truth; yet, Heidegger was also threatened with the dissolution of all that he had worked toward his entire life. Following his nervous breakdown, Heidegger applied for Emeritus status, declaring that he would refrain from teaching. He was granted Emeritus status, provided he refrain from teaching. By 1950, Heidegger was reinstated to his teaching position, and, one year later, he was made professor Emeritus.

During Heidegger's hiatus from teaching, he met Medard Boss. With the help of Heidegger, Boss drafted "Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology," which would become a seminal work in existential psychology. Heidegger hoped that Boss' application of his philosophy to psychology would help those in need of aid, as well as take his thought from the academic world to a larger audience. Throughout his career, Boss would continue to promote a Daseinanalytic approach to psychotherapy and medicine.

After writing Being and Time in 1927, Heidegger later had a "turn" (kehre) in his thought. At what point this "turning" took place is still debateable, but it offered a radical transformation in his thought (see "thought" below). Heidegger's later work, following his "turn," would pave the way to hermeneutics and poststructuralism.

Heidegger died in Frieburg on May 26th, 1976. In the United States, the news of his death went largely unheeded. Interestingly, the news of Heidegger's death was received with widespread coverage in Japan. The connection of Heidegger' s thought to the East has not received much attention over the years. But it is clear that he first had his greatest impact in Japan with the writings of Count Kuki Shuzo. Further, Heidegger carried on a relationship with D.T. Suzuki, whom he met with on several occassions. Further, Heidegger at one time attempted to translate Lao Tzu into German, but never finished the project.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest in philosophy (only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field), he came to France at the age of twenty-five. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation was a columnist for the newspaper Combat.

But his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to the demands of the time; in 1947 Camus retired from political journalism and, besides writing his fiction and essays, was very active in the theatre as producer and playwright (e.g., Caligula, 1944). He also adapted plays by Calderon, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. His love for the theatre may be traced back to his membership in L'Equipe, an Algerian theatre group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

The essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds Camus's notion of the absurd and of its acceptance with "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction". Meursault, central character of L'Étranger (The Stranger), 1942, illustrates much of this essay: man as the nauseated victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit, later - when the young killer faces execution - tempted by despair, hope, and salvation. Dr. Rieux of La Peste (The Plague), 1947, who tirelessly attends the plague-stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of injustice, and confirms Camus's words: "We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them". Other well-known works of Camus are La Chute (The Fall), 1956, and L'Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom), 1957. His austere search for moral order found its aesthetic correlative in the classicism of his art. He was a stylist of great purity and intense concentration and rationality.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor and a devout hausfrau. His father died - mad - in 1849. Rejecting his father's faith, Nietzsche became a lifelong rebel against Christianity. "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross", he wrote in Der Antichrist (1888). Nietzsche was brought up by pious female relatives. He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn (1864-65) and Leipzig (1864-68) and became, at the age of twenty-five, a professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Among his acquaintances was Jakob Burckhardt, the writer of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). During the Franco-Prussian War, Nietzche served briefly as a medical orderly with the Prussian army. Nietzsche's military career was short: he contracted dysentery and diphtheria.

In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, Die Geburt De Tragoedie Aus Dem Geist Der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy). In it, he diagnosed human beings as subject to unconscious, involuntary, overwhelmingly self-destructive Dionysian instincts. According to Nietzsche, the Greeks went against this tendency and erected the sober, rational, and active Apollonian principle.

Nietzsche considered reality as an endless Becoming (Werden). Apollinian power is associated with the creation of illusion - the plastic arts deny the actuality of becoming with the illusion of timeless beauty. Dionysian frenzy threatens to destroy all forms and codes. Only the Apollinian power of the Greeks was able to control the Dionysian flood. But all illusions are temporary, and in his "experimentalist phase" (1878-1882) Nietzsche saw that the loss of the Apollinian spell will make the return to Dionysian actuality even more painful. But it must be noted, that the Dionysus whom Nietzsche celebrated in his later writings was the synthesis of the two forces and represented controlled passion. In the earlier work he favored Apollo. His thesis, however, was that it took both to make the birth of tragedy possible. Later in life Nietzsche addressed Cosima Wagner as "Princess Ariadne" in his letters to her and declared that the author of them is the god Dionysus.

At Basel, Nietzsche had become a close friend of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and the second part of The Birth of Tragedy deals with Wagner's music. Nietzsche called the composer "Old Minotaur." In History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell remarked: "Nietzsche's superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek." By the end of the decade, Nietzsche became interested in the French enlightenment, which ended his friendship with Wagner in 1878. The composer despised the French and searched acceptance in Germany. Also Nietzsche did not accept the rising Wagnerian cult at Bayreuth, especially with its anti-Semitism. The religiosity of Parsifal was too much for him. "What did I never forgive Wagner?... that he became reichdeutsch," Nietzsche wrote, disillusioned.

Nietzsche gave up Prussian citizenship in 1869 and remained stateless for the rest of his life. In 1879 Nietzsche resigned his professorship - or was forced to give up his chair - due to his headaches and poor health. He wandered about Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, living in boardinghouses, and producing most of his famous books.

"When thou goest to woman, take thy whip."

Nietzsche respected that sincere and "genuine Christianity" that he considered "possible in all ages" - but Wagner's Parsifal, with its sickly Christianity, clearly did not seem to him to belong in that category. In Bayreuth Nietzsche had became increasingly aware of the impossibility of serving both Wagner and his own call. Rejected by Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), to whom he had proposed marriage, Nietzsche withdrew into the existence of a tourist-scholar. He spent summers in Switzerland and winters in Italy, and published his major works in a period of ten years. Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) appeared first in three parts in 1883-1884 and was formally published in 1892. Among his other works were Jenseits Von Gut Und Böse (1886), Zur Genealogie Der Moral (1887), Götzen-Dämmerung (1889), and Ecce Homo (pub. in 1908, written in 1888).

Thus Spoke Zarathustra centered around the notions of the will to power, radical nihilism, and the eternal recurrence. Pain, suffering, and contradictions are no longer seen as objections to existence but as an expression of its actual tensions. In a note, 'Anti-Darwin', Nietzsche stated that "man as a species is not progressing." He substituted the ordinary conception of progress for a doctrine of eternal recurrence, and stressed the positive power of heroic suffering.

"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty - I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind." (from The Twilight of the Idols, 1888)

In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in Turin, Italy. He was found in a street, weeping and embracing a horse. Nietzsche lived first in an asylum and then in his family's care. His insanity was probably due to an early syphilitic infection. During his disease Nietzsche was almost invariably gentle and pleasant, and in lucid hours he engaged in conversation. Nietzsche spent his last decade in mental darkness and died in Weimar on August 25, 1900. After his death, his sister, Elisabeth, secured the rights to his literary remains and edited them for publication - sometimes in arbitrary and distorted form.

Elisabeth had married Bernhard Förster in 1885. Förster was a prominent leader of the German anti-Semitic movement which Nietzsche loathed. "For my personal taste such an agitator is something impossible for closer acquaintance," he wrote in a letter to his mother. In 1880’s Elisabeth founded with Förster a German colony in Paraguay, which was meant for the "Aryans only." Förster killed himself 1889 when his hand was caught in the till.

How much Nietzsche's illness - dementia paralytica or syphilis - affected his thinking and writing is open to speculations. During the second period of brain syphilis, the patient often acts manic-depressively and has megalomaniac visions. During his manic period in the 1880s Nietzsche produced Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Gay Science, and Beyond Good and Evil.

Nietzsche believed that all life evidences a will to power. Hopes for a higher state of being after death are explained as compensations for failures in this life. The famous view about the "death of God" resulted from his observations of the movement from traditional beliefs to a trust of science and commerce. Nietzsche dissected Christianity and Socialism as faiths of the "little men," where excuses for weakness paraded as moral principles. John Stuart Mill's liberal democratic humanism was a target for scorn, and he called Mill "that blockhead." His announcement of the death of God can be interpreted religiously or atheistically: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him... What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?..." (in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882)

According to Nietzsche, the other world is an illusion, and instead of worshipping gods, man should concentrate on his own elevation, which Nietzsche symbolizes in the Übermench. The contrast of "good and evil" as opposed to that of "good and bad," Nietzsche associated with slave morality. He argued that no single morality can be appropriate to all men. The meaning of history was the appearance, at rare moments, of the exceptional individual. And by creating the figure of Zarathustra, Nietzsche presented the teacher of the coming superman.

"My first dose of Nietzsche shocked me profoundly. In black and white he had had the audacity to affirm: 'God is dead!' What? I had just learned that God did not exist, and now someone was informing me that he had died." (Salvador Dali in Diary of a Genius, 1966)

First Nietzsche's works began to gain significant public notice by Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes, who lectured on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen in 1888. The philosophers’ thoughts influenced, among others, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Paul Sartre. Although the Nazis used some of the philosopher's ideas, Nietzsche was deeply opposed to the collective tendencies that labeled National Socialism. He rejected biological racism and German nationalism, writing "every great crime against culture for the last four hundred years lies on their conscience." Nazis, on the other hand, welcomed Nietzsche's view of "Herrenmensch," a new type of man who with his robber instincts was able to manipulate the masses and who was a law unto himself. Adolf Hitler kept a bust of him and in 1943 gave his works to Mussolini, who did not read them. When Elisabeth Nietzsche died in 1935, Hitler participated in the funeral ceremony. The Nazis built three years later a monument for Nietzsche.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow, the second son of a staff doctor at the Hospital for the Poor – later Dostoevsky's father acquired an estate and serfs. Dostoevsky was educated at home and at a private school. With his pious mother he made annual pilgrimages to the monastery of the Trinity and Saint Sergei. Shortly after her death in 1837, he was sent to St. Petersburg, where he entered the Academy for Military Engineers. Dostoevsky was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in 1842 and next years he graduated as a War Ministry draftsman. He had no interest in military engineering but at the academy he could also study Russian and French literature.

Dostoevsky's father Mikhail Andreevich died in 1839, probably of apoplexy, but there was strong rumors that he was murdered by his own serfs in a quarrel. With the help of a small income from the estate, he resigned in 1844 his commission to devote himself to writing. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), which he wrote in a little over nine months in his small room, gained a great success with the critics, who hailed Dostoevsky as the new Gogol. "We all came from Gogol's overcoat," Dostoevsky said. One critic remarked dryly, "You have Gogols growing like mushrooms." The leading literary critic Vissarion Belinsky called Poor Folk "the first attempt at a social novel we've had".

Poor Folk was followed by The Double (1846), subtitled "A Petersburg Poem", which irritated Dostoevsky's former admirer, Vissarion Belinsky. In the story a man is losing his mind – he is haunted by a look-alike who eventually usurps his position. Belinsky remarked that such atypical "psychopathic" characters belonged in madhouses rather than in works of art.

In 1846 Dostoevsky joined a group of utopian socialists, who gathered Mihail Petrashevsky's home. Petrashevsky was an eccentric and socialist, who once went to a church dressed as a woman. The secret police had placed an agent in the group, and on April 23 in 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested during a reading of Vissarion Belinsky's radical letter 'Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends,' and sentenced to death. With mock execution, which thoroughly shocked the writer, the sentence was commuted to imprisonment in Siberia. Dostoevsky spent four years in hard labor in a stockade, wearing fetters. Many of the other convicts had committed murder. On his release in 1854 he was assigned as a common soldier in Semipalatinsk. Eventually he became an ensign. These experiences provided subject matter for the his future works. His heroes and heroines reflected moral values which were vitally important for the author. They also were men and women of action, whose thoughts influenced deeply the young in Russia. During the years in Siberia Dostoevsky became a monarchist and a devout follower of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1859 as a writer with a religious mission. He published three works that derive in different ways from his Siberia experiences: The House of the Dead (1861-62), a fictional account of prison life, The Insulted and Injured (1861), which reflects the author's refutation of naive Utopianism in the face of evil, and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), his account of trip to Western Europe.

The Insulted and Injured was greeted by Dostoevsky's old and new readers with enthusiasm. It was completed after his penal service and exile, and published on his return to Petersburg. The narrator is Ivan Petrovich, a young aspiring writer. His literary debut, working methods, and social situation were taken from Dostoevsky's own life. The hero falls from the fame into poverty. When the book appeared it was coldly received by the critics. Dostoevsky defended the work in an open letter, writing that he knew for certain that even though the novel should be a failure, there would be poetry in it, and the two most important characters would be portrayed truthfully and even artistically.

In 1857 Dostoevsky married Maria Isaev, a 29-year old widow. He resigned from the army two years later. Between the years 1861 and 1863 he served as the editor of the monthly periodical Time. The paper was later suppressed because of an article on the Polish uprising. In 1862 Dostoevsky went to abroad for the first time, traveling in France and England. He traveled Europe again in 1863 and 1865. During this period his wife and brother died, he was obsessed with gambling, and plagued by debts and frequent epileptic seizures.

From the turmoil of the 1860s emerged Notes from Underground (1864), a psychological study of an outsider. The book marked a watershed in Dostoevsky artistic development. Notes from Underground starts with a confession by the narrator. "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased." The story continues with the monologue of the Underground man, who reveals his inner self to his imaginary reader. He is humiliated by his former schoolmates in a party and he gets very drunk. In a dark shop, which functions as a brothel in the evenings, he makes impressive speeches to a humble prostitute, Liza. "What are you giving up here? What are you enslaving? Why, you're enslaving your soul; something you don't really own, together with your body! You're giving away your love to be defiled by any drunkard! Love! After all, that's all there is!" He humiliates her, gives money when she only shows her real caring, but eventually she demonstrates her moral superiority. Notes from Underground was followed by Crime and Punishment (1866), an account of an individual's fall and redemption, The Idiot (1868-69), depicting a Christ-like figure, Prince Myshkin, through whom the author revealed the spiritual bankruptcy of Russia, and The Possessed (1872), an exploration of philosophical nihilism.

Crime and Punishment was serialized in Ruskii vestnik (The Russian Messenger) from January through December 1866 and appeared in a book form next year. On one level the novel belongs to the genre of detective fiction, but Dostoevsky's interest lies on the criminal – the sinner. The story is set in St. Petersburg, which Dostoevsky called the "most fantastic city in the world". The city, with its mythology, also becomes the accomplice of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, a young resentful student. An assiduous readers of newspapers, Dostoevsky saw in the crime reports symbolic meanings, signs of the hidden ills of the whole society.

Raskolnikov kills a pawnbroker, a greedy old woman, and her half-witted stepsister as well. He attempts to justify the murder in terms of its advantageous social consequences. He argues that each age gives birth to a few superior beings who are not constrained by ordinary morality – and he is one of such beings. The core of the novel is dialogue, as its is in Dostoevsky's other major works. Under the influence of the meek, Christian prostitute Sonia, Raskolnikov confronts the hollowness of his thoughts, which eventually leads to confession and redemption. Raskolnikov's nemesis is Porfiry Petrovich, a police investigator, who knows his guilt. In the demonic Svidrigailov, who commits suicide, Raskolnikov sees his own picture. "You know," confesses Svidrigailov to Raskolnikov, "from the very beginning I always thought it was a pity that your sister had not chanced to be born in the second or third century of our era, as the daughter of a ruling prince somewhere, or some governor or proconsul in Asia minor. She would doubtless have been one of those who suffered martyrdom, and she would, of course, have smiled when they burned her breast with red-hot pinchers. She would have deliberately brought it on herself." In his agony Raskolnikov realizes, that in murdering he has killed the essentially human in himself. Raskolnikov goes to Siberia for seven years. Sonia follows him to his imprisonment. – The novel has been filmed several times. Josef von Sternberg's version from 1935, starring Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov, was primarily a detective story. In the same year Pierre Chenal made his adaptation, Crime et châtiment. Denis Sanders moved the action to contemporary California in 1959. Lev Kulidjanov's version from 1969 was long – 3 hours and 20 minutes – and the most ambitious of all.

Dostoevsky married in 1867 Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, his 22-years old stenographer, who seems to have understood her husband's manias and rages. To avoid his creditors Dostoevsky left Russia with her and spent time in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, mostly in poverty. He was obsessed with gambling, but in Russia his literary fame only grew. When The Possessed turned out to be a success, he returned to Russia, and purchased a house in the provincial town of Staraya Russa. From 1873 to 1874 Dostoevsky was editor of the conservative weekly Citizen. Among his friends was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a reactionary and the tutor to the czarevitch Alexander. In 1876 he founded his own monthly, The Writer's Diary. From its writings he collected The Diary of a Writer (1876).

Dostoevsky's short story from this period 'The Gentle Maiden' (1876) inspired later Robert Bresson's film Une Femme Douce (1969). In the story, narrated in first-person, a husband searches the reason for his wife's suicide and goes through their life together. "How it has happened I cannot tell, I try, again and again, to explain it to myself. Ever since six o'clock I have been trying to explain it, yet cannot bring my thoughts to a focus. Perhaps it is through trying so much that I fail." Gradually his narration reveals him as pompous, cruel, and tyrannical man. "She could go nowhere without my leave," he says, and the reader realizes that suicide offered her the only way to escape from her domineering husband.

By the time of The Brothers of Karamazov (1879-80), Dostoevsky was recognized in his own country as one of its great writers. He enjoyed his role as a prophet, an original public voice in the crisis period of his country. Dostoevsky final novel culminated his lifelong obsession with patricide – the assumed murder of his father had left deep marks on the author's psyche. The novel is constructed around a simple plot, dealing with the murder of the father of the Karamazov family. One of the sons, Dmitri, is arrested. The brothers represent three aspects of man's being: reason (Ivan), emotion (Dmitri) and faith (Alesha). This material is transcended into a moral and spiritual statement of contemporary society.

An epileptic all his life, Dostoevsky died in St. Petersburg on February 9 (New Style), 1881. He was buried in the Aleksandr Nevsky monastery, St. Petersburg. Anna Grigoryevna devoted the rest of her life to cherish the literary heritage of her husband. Dostoevsky's novels anticipated many of the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud. Dostoevsky himself was strongly influenced by such thinkers as Aleksandr Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky. He saw that great art must have liberty to develop on its own terms, but it always deals with central social concerns. He supported the Russian war against Turkey, and like much later Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he emphasized more the spiritual transformation of the individual than social revolution. In the notorious essay 'The Jewish Question' the author did not hide his anti-Semitism. Dostoevsky's novels have been read in many ways – according to some biographical interpretations, he raped a young girl, which he revealed in a fictionalized form in his writings. Dostoevsky nerver met his great contemporary writer Leo Tolstoy. The Westernizing Turgenev was in many ways his opposite.

"Karl Jaspers", (1883-1969), German philosopher, one of the originators of existentialism, whose work influenced modern
theology and psychiatry as well as philosophy.

Jaspers was born in Oldenburg on Feb. 23, 1883. He studied law and medicine and received his M.D. from the University of Heidelberg. He taught psychiatry at Heidelberg University from 1916, turned to philosophy, and held the chair of philosophy until 1937. During most of the Nazi period Jaspers, whose wife was Jewish and who refused to make any concessions to the Nazi authorities, was prevented from teaching. In 1948 he accepted a professorship in philosophy at Basel, Switzerland.

In his first major work, General Psychopathology (1913; trans. 1963), Jaspers criticized the scientific pretensions of psychotherapy as misleading and deterministic. He then published Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Psychology of World Views, 1919), a work particularly important for cataloging various possible attitudes toward life.

Jaspers's major work in three volumes, Philosophy (1932), gives his view of the history of philosophy and introduces his major themes. Jaspers identified philosophy with philosophical thinking itself, not with any particular set of conclusions. His philosophy is an effort to explore and describe the margins and limits of experience. He used the term das Umgreifende ("the encompassing") to refer to the ultimate limits of being, the indefinite horizon in which all subjective and objective experience is possible, but which can never be rationally apprehended.

Another important work is Existenzphilosophie (1938; Philosophy and Existence, 1971). The term Existenz designates the indefinable experience of freedom and possibility that constitutes the authentic being of individuals who become aware of the encompassing by confronting such limit-situations as chance, suffering, conflict, guilt, and death. Jaspers also wrote extensively on the threat to human freedom posed by modern science and modern economic and political institutions. One of his poltical work is The Question of German Guilt.

Jaspers died in Basel, on Feb. 20, 1969....