All this struggle for life that just ends on a random day.
Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky
Not found in their works No source has been found in Fyodor Dostoevsky's works.Draft entry, not yet reviewed
Where it really comes from
No such sentence occurs in the 19 works in the source texts (Poor Folk, White Nights, The House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, Bobok, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man; and in Russian also Humiliated and Insulted, Winter Notes, The Eternal Husband, The Adolescent, The Meek One, the Writer's Diary, the Pushkin speech and the letters). The English texts were searched for 'struggle for life', 'random day', 'struggle' with 'ends'; the Russian for борьба за жизнь (it occurs only as the title of Pisarev's article on Crime and Punishment, cited in the editors' commentary), борьба за существование, случайный день and в один прекрасный день. Web searches for the exact wording and for Turkish and Russian forms found no dated source and no real author. The idea of a life cut off on an ordinary day is close to Dostoevsky's own experience of the mock execution of 22 December 1849, which he describes in a letter of that day and through Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, Part 1, chapter 5; but in both he draws the opposite conclusion: that every minute of life is precious.
Where it circulates
Circulates online as a short Dostoevsky quote, without a work, in melancholy posts about the pointlessness of effort in the face of death.
What it says
All the effort of living, and it stops on some ordinary day nobody chose: life's struggle looks absurd against the arbitrariness of death.
Use with care
Not found in Dostoevsky, and close to the opposite of what he wrote about death. For a genuine line, use the man reprieved on the scaffold in The Idiot ('I would turn every minute into an age').
Tags
What it is made of
Nearby
- What if I were not to die! What if I could go back to life — what eternity! I would turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed. related
- Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness. related
- Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. alike 61%
- The most terrifying freedom is discovering that even your suffering is your own fault. alike 49%
- The price of loving someone very much is never loving anyone again. alike 48%
- Look at you comforting others with the words you wish someone had said to you. alike 46%
Checked against
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