I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.

The line captures a sudden, crushing perception of social isolation: the speaker experiences himself as a solitary, negligible “I” facing an undifferentiated mass—“everybody”—that seems unified, powerful, and implicitly judging. Dostoyevsky often dramatizes this psychological split between the intensely self-conscious individual and the crowd, where the crowd becomes a force that erases nuance and reduces the person to shame, fear, or defiance. The phrasing suggests not merely loneliness but a sense of being outnumbered in reality itself—one private consciousness against a collective world. It can also be read as a critique of conformity: “everybody” stands for the tyranny of common opinion that makes the individual feel unreal or excluded.