Dostoevysky and the Origins of Burnout

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, the novel’s central protagonist, asks his father for permission to join a monastery, where he seeks to purify his soul and sanctify his work. Cynical and half-drunk, Alyosha’s father makes a prediction about what monastic life will do to the saintly youngster: “You will burn and you will burn out.” Not until nearly a century after the novel’s 1880 appearance did social science come up with a definition of what that phrase, burn…