ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein was as profoundly influenced by his appreciation of fiction as by his reading of philosophy, mathematics, science, and devotional literature. Wittgenstein reportedly carried with him a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov along with Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief during his tour of duty in the Austrian army in the First World War, and is said to have made a detailed phonetic study of Dostoevsky in Russian while learning the language in preparation for a planned but ultimately abandoned emigration to the Soviet Union.2
The unique literary style of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus owes much to the aphoristic devices of Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, all of whose writings Wittgenstein was deeply familiar with already in the early period of his thought when the Tractatus was being composed.3 There is a kind of avant poetry and music to the clipped sentences of the Tractatus, reminiscent of the minimalist works of modern architecture that Wittgenstein admired.
