The profound novelist and philosopher Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born on November 11, 1821 in Moscow, Russia. Dostoyevsky is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists in world literature. He explored the darkest and most complicated regions of the human mind: guilt, conscience, suffering, faith, evil, freedom, and redemption. His extraordinary ability to penetrate human psychology made him an important precursor of modern psychological fiction and existentialist philosophy. He was fascinated by contradictions, and his characters are often simultaneously noble and selfish, loving and cruel, intelligent and irrational. Nietzsche admired Dostoyevsky's psychological insight, while Freud considered him an exceptionally important psychological writer. “Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.” (The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Book II, Chapter 2, “The Old Buffoon.”)