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Did Nietzsche say that Dostoevsky "cried truth [from the blood]"?

He praised Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground (1864) for having “cried truth from the blood.”

The Handy Philosophy Answer Book By Naomi Zack

But I can't find anything except commentary on this, and don't know German. It seems vaguely possible, that he did, though it's a short and impassioned quote.

Who has written about the literary qualities of Nietzsche's aphorisms? If the quote isn't attributable to him, why does it keep coming up, what's going on?

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IMO, it is a "fake quote".

You can find it in many places on the web, but without references.

You reference is : The Handy Philosophy Answer Book and the quote is preceded by :

"the only psychologist from whom I [Nietzsche] have something to learn."

This is a "real" Nietzsche's quote, from The Twilight of the Idols, sect.45 :

"The testimony of Dostoevski is relevant to this problem — Dostoevski, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life... This profound human being, who was ten times right in his low estimate of the superficial Germans, lived for a long time among the convicts in Siberia — hardened criminals for whom there was no way back to society — and found them very different from what he himself had expected: they were carved out of just about the best, hardest, and most valuable wood that grows anywhere on Russian soil."

One of the "web sources" I've found ref to Twilight of the Idols, 1889, §45.

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  • good spot with the last sentence, thanks. yeah there's no mention of truth or blood in that aphorism, thanks
    – user34105
    Jul 31, 2018 at 11:11

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