The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. 

The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. 

He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky

. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel.

 Literature always anticipates life. 

It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.