Abstract

People sometimes ask whether their lives are meaningful or not, whether or not their lives add up to anything. Sometimes they also ask whether life as such is meaningful or not. These are not unconnected questions. Still they are not questions which everyone asks himself. Nor do we always readily recognise what one who asks these questions wants to know. There are some people who will not even find such questions sensible. Some will regard them not as questions but simply as symptoms of something having gone wrong somewhere. Thus in the Diary of the Student Kostya Ryabtsev we find the following words