Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground

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Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground

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1lilisin
feb 16, 2009, 1:15 pm

So I will be starting off with Notes from Underground. Anyone care to join me? :)

2MissTeacher
feb 16, 2009, 2:23 pm

I'm about halfway through it, and I must say, at first I was a little disturbed. Not for the reasons you would think, though--no, I was disturbed by how much the narrator thinks like me on one of my bad days.

He's a lot more outlandish in his actions, but eerily similar in his reasoning...

3lilisin
feb 19, 2009, 4:13 pm

I'm reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translated edition of Notes from Underground from Vintage Classics. While in the bookstore I compared the first page to the Dover Thrift edition and I found this translation was less stiff and much more fluid. I read Crime and Punishment as translated by these two and was very impressed so I think I will be forever sticking to their editions of Dostoevsky's works.

I must say though, that this is twice that I've been intimidated just by Pevear's prefaces/introductions. He tends to include all of his Dostoevsky's works making you feel a bit wary for not having read all of them yourself.

He does make some interesting remarks in this preface but I must admit to getting lost as I got towards the end and he really got into Dostoevsky's influence for this novel.

Oh Russian literature. Sometimes I just do not understand you.

And now to the actual book!

4tomcatMurr
mar 18, 2009, 9:13 am

Do not despair, lilisin. I hope you will find this useful.

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2008/05/double-and-notes-from-underground.html

5WilfGehlen
apr 8, 2009, 8:51 am

Seeing points of contiguity with Zemyatin and We, even to the engineers reference, extracting the square root. I'm also reminded of an anecdote of someone, perhaps Zemyatin, who drew a self-caricature with his tongue sticking out. That image is here also.

Oh, and I'm reading the edition from hesperus press, translated by Hugh Aplin, forward by Will Self. No long treatise here. Self seems to say that he was more in love with the book as a youth and why would any mature person want to read it. Refreshing attitude, certainly in keeping with the ideas of the underground man, working against your own self-interest to assert your freedom. Hmm, is that Self really a Self, or a self, a pseudonymous Self?

6tomcatMurr
apr 8, 2009, 9:10 am

Interesting post. I haven't read We yet, but it's on my TBR. The image of a tongue sticking out also appears in Humiliated and Insulted.

I don't know what Will Self means (who he?). I have read this book at least once a year for the last 10 years, and find something new in it everytime. It always speaks to me. I consider it one of Dostoevsky's greatest works, and a masterpiece of world literature. Just so as you know lol.

7WilfGehlen
Redigerat: apr 8, 2009, 9:35 am

>5 WilfGehlen:,6 I guess Will Self is a real person, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Self. I was thinking Self, Will--self will--but I guess not.

Yeah, I think We realizes these ideas of Dostoevsky and we then realize that our ideals of civilized man are really a dystopia, suitable for the angels, but not for a human.

Self also mentions Bakunin, "the drive to destruction can also be seen as a creative drive." This continues a thread which I noticed in Waugh's Vile Bodies (q.v.). And I'm also pursuing a recent poem treating man's instability as necessary to creativity. Going back to Zamyatin, he posits a dynamic tension between entropy and energy as where life lives. I had put some of these ideas in my profile before I started to discover these connections out there. I'm beginning to understand them better now.

8tomcatMurr
Redigerat: apr 8, 2009, 11:48 am

>7 WilfGehlen: I know I'm just being facetious with you. And Will Self. ;-)

I mean, it kind of makes me grin with schadenfreude, I have to say it, when the likes of Mr Self are invited to write about a towering genius like Dostoevsky and then do so in that sort of patronising, parochial way, and totally reveal their shallowness. Kind of like David Mitchell endorsing Italo Calvino. Endorsing? lol

No offence to David Mitchell, whose novels I admire and enjoy, but Calvino is another towering genius. Calvino writing about Dostoevsky -now that I would like to read!

The Bakunin quote is very interesting and very Russian. Herzen, Bakunin's loyal but estranged companion of youth, was the first to open up this kind of thinking in Russia, followed by Turgenev's incredible forshadowing of the nihilist/revolutionary type in Bazarov, in Fathers and Sons. Dostoevsky then develops this with the Underground Man and The Demons (beware corny joke with the touchstone). Bakunin's influence was also of course enormous in the early revolutionary period.

Chernyashevsky's enormously influential and popular novel What is to be done? plays a huge part in all this, even to the extent that Lenin used the same title for one of the key writings of the Bolshevist movement. Creativity and destruction have always been linked in Russian culture -look at poor old Gogol- and the axe is an enduring symbol in ! It's Stalin who perverted it in the end. It's my considered belief that Dostoevsky forshadowed this in his revolutionary characters.

I can't wait to read Zamyatin, he's been a recent discovery, but I still haven't read him.
What poem are you mysteriously pursuing?

9WilfGehlen
apr 8, 2009, 3:34 pm

>8 tomcatMurr: Took a while to find the poem again, went back to start of search at the Waugh quote from Vile Bodies. Book is Bird Skin Coat, Angela Sorby. Haven't read it, just came on it because a review had some of the same key words as the quote did. I thought it remarkable that these ideas were transposed between 2009 and the 1930's, but now I see they go back to the 1850's.

The French have a word for it, I don't know what, plus ca change? I wish I knew French. Sometimes.

10WilfGehlen
apr 10, 2009, 11:07 pm

Hmmm, is the underground man Yigor Yefimov (stepfather of Netochka Nezvanova) metempsychosed? Or simply hosed? . . . Thoughts of Poe's The Premature Burial. U is buried alive by his alienation. . . His reason makes him unsane, because the world doesn't run on reason. Since one's self is the most important in the world, it's reasonable that everyone else should bow, should apologize, should initiate friendship. Why can't they understand? They don't deserve to live. . . Like Josef K., U can function at the office (boss is surprisingly willing to make loans to U) but has no life. . . U thinks of himself as free, but, like K., is a prisoner of his own soul. . . What can free him? A Paulist epiphany? A Zen satori? Couch therapy? (No, the session with Liza didn't work.) Nepenthe? Only when the mountain comes to Mohammed. . . As GBS is quoted, 'Reasonable men adjust themselves to their environment. Unreasonable men attempt to change their environment to suit themselves. Therefore, all progress is the work of unreasonable men.' So the question is not what will cure U, that seems beyond hope, but how can U effect change? Perhaps with a little note, the most insignificant of notes.

11edwinbcn
dec 25, 2013, 1:09 am

Notes from underground
Finished reading: 19 January 2010



This summer, while carrying my edition of the Great short works of Dostoyevsky on holiday, a sly compromise to my partner who forbade me to bring more that two books, I reread Notes from the underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

My first-time reading gave me the immediate sense of dealing with a top piece of literature, but I was nonetheless nonplussed as to the meaning, and before reading the book a second time this summer, I could not remember a single scrap about its contents. This second time round, my understanding and appreciation of the work is greatly enhanced by reading it within the context of several other works by Dostoevsky, all complex and rather depressing.

Dostoevsky has this predilection of choosing to focus on characters who a clearly defective in society, as the main character of this novel is clearly a "loser". The first part consists of that type of person's typical self-accusatory ramblings, expressing his misery and self-contempt. The second scene shows him to be a social misfit, rejected, and for good reason, by his former classmates, while in the last scene he reveals himself as a cruel sadist in relation to a girl, who is worse off than he himself.

The novel is somewhat difficult to read, because the characters' frame of mind is based on conventions in nineteenth century Petersburg, and not all allusions and references are immediately clear or understandable to the modern, foreign reader. However, the true nature of this anti-hero shines through so clearly, that we cannot mistake the basic meaning of the novel upon close, reading, which may need to be repeated.



Other books I have read by Fyodor Dostoevsky:
Netochka Nezvanova
Crime and punishment