Dostoevsky

Extollager

Extollager

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Here's a place to discuss the writings, times, and life of the author of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Demons, Notes from Underground, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," and more.

My own experience is that he is one of a handful of indispensable authors. If I own 2000 or more books, but had to pare them down to 20, Brothers and Demons would make the cut. There is great wisdom, real horror, and crazy funniness in his work. Yet he can be unreadable; at least, I have given up ever reading The Adolescent (aka A Raw Youth) all the way through.

When I can, I read Dostoevsky in the translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky. With their recent release of Notes from a Dead House, Dostoevsky's book about being a Siberian political prisoner and exile, they have, I suppose completed the translation of his major works.

Here I mean to post some comments on Notes from Underground, which I'm reading for the third time, but I hope some Chrons people will burst in with comments on anything by FD that they like, or other relevant remarks.
 
Starting to wrestle with Notes from Underground, which I don't recommend as anyone's first Dostoevsky...
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Page references are to the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation. I distinguish between Dostoevsky (D), the real author of the book, and the Underground Man, his narrator (UGM). Interpretation of what the UGM says should take into account D’s note on the first page: he says that people like the UGM must exist in a society like ours (i.e. in Russia, early 1864); also, as a man of 40 (page 5), D points out that the UGM came of age in Russia of the late 1840s. Page 6 would, furthermore, lead us to think that D sees the UGM not vaguely as “a Russian,” but as a dweller in Petersburg (the setting of Crime and Punishment). The Pevear and Volokhonsky endnotes will help us with certain topical references. When we’ve read Notes, we will be able to say something about the degree to which it seems just a period piece, and the degree to which it has a wider significance.

The UGM was a moderately successful bureaucrat, but resigned from the civil service once he inherited money in an amount sufficient for him to live on. Although the text makes it seem that the UGM is indulging in a monologue with a captive audience (and we might imagine this book as furnishing material for oral interpretation in a speech course), we soon learn that the UGM is writing things as they come to him. We might wonder if he is really writing for other people or as therapy for himself.

At first he seems just to want to talk about himself – how he doesn’t feel well, how he lives in a withdrawn manner (or does he?), etc. He notices what he is doing and says that there are plenty of other people who are uncomfortably conscious, self-aware.

His consciousness, however, isn’t, for example, that of a poet who experiences an exceptional sensitivity to impressions from nature (like Wordsworth). Rather, it seems he discovered years ago that when he indulged in certain “secret, mean, abnormal little pleasure,” and went skulking home from them at night, the consciousness of shame and reaching a “wall” would be followed by a strange kind of pleasure (p. 8). He wants to explain, perhaps most of all to himself, what was going on here and why it was important.

On p. 13 he’s talking again about “walls” – the “laws of nature” and mathematics, things that one can’t struggle against successfully. He does not want to be “reconciled” to these things. We might ask: What does he long for in spite of the obstacles he’s encountered?
 
I've been a fan of Dostoevsky since my third year of gymnasium when I read Crime and Punishment for a literature class in less than 3 days and then spent the rest of that week reading The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot as only those two were at the time available to me. I really love the reread value his books tend to have which I find especially true for Crime and Punishment, my favourite work of his and quite possibly my favourite book of all times. I don't even remember how many times I reread it in last 5 years. The characters in it really speak to me and I'm fond of quite a number of them, especially of Razumihin. Since I encountered it during a literature class reading, I tend to look at it as a classic high Russian realism piece and it is one that I find best embodies the qualities of that period that I enjoy in works.
 
Well, er, this morning I read "The Peasant Marey", an excerpt from his The Diary Of A Writer (1876-1878) from this anthology:

Started off with a mind-shattering view of life in a Russian prison in the mid 1800's then ended with Dostoevsky having a vivid recollection of an all but forgotten memory from childhood involving the titular peasant. The center of all this seems to be a chance meeting with "a political prisoner called M" who made the strange utterance "Je haïs ces brigands!" which probably wouldn't be so strange if you could speak---French, is it? The question now is, is there a connection between Marey, M, and the foreign phrase or is this just a glimpse into the ugly incongruent nature of prison life? I don't know, but I do think a genuine short story or, shy of that, a self-contained extract from a novel would have served purposes better.
 
Thank you. Never been a big fan of foreign phrases unless they're translated in parentheses or footnotes. I remember reading a Sherlock Holmes story where the last sentence, having all the feel of a punch line, was a foreign phrase with no translation. I said "darn it", I was so mad.
 
effing time ago i had latin
lemme have a go
the people boo me,the people love what i do
Last phrase might be something to the effect of What do i care,I make lots of money
Must be quote
I have a feeling it's slightly satirical
 
I was pretty much in the neighbourhood:“Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo; Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplar in arca” (Book 1, Satire 1). It means, “The public hisses at me, but I applaud myself in my own house, and simultaneously contemplate the money in my chest.”
It's a quote from Horace,and it's a phrase typical of the man
he 's basically saying: I'm laughing all the way to the bank
 
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Some more Notes from Underground notes.


Evaluating just how innovative D is in the way he writes the Notes would require of readers a knowledge of contemporary European literature. We shouldn’t assume that readers would have assumed that what they were reading was meant to be “a novel.” They might have run across material in journals before that was presented as a monologue by a character, both in the usual literary sense of a fictional person and in the sense of an oddball.

Up to page 30 of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, we readers have been given almost nothing of some of the things we would expect of a novel. We don’t know the UGM’s name. We do know the locale is Petersburg and that this is significant, but not what part of the city the UGM resides in. We know his age and bureaucratic rank, but not much more of the sort of information that a conventional novel would be likely to tell us (e.g. about his family, friends if any, colleagues, appearance, possessions, education, etc.). Omitting such details, Dostoevsky makes us attend all the more to the little we do know, including the assertion that the UGM is the sort of person who must appear in a society such as his, i.e. such as that of the readers of these pages when they were published first. Readers thus would be challenged to compare the UGM and his opinions, and his occasional incoherence, with those of people whom they know or know about. How representative is he (and of precisely what social type)?

In Chapters VII and VIII (pp. 20ff.), the UGM frets about habits of thought that reduce the mysterious depth of human beings. (His book is 150 years old, but in this matter not very hard to relate to the situation of a university teacher today. Poetic/imaginative experience doesn’t lend itself to quantifiable outcomes, but no faculty, not even literature teachers, are excused from the requirement of specifying measurable results whereby they may, it is assumed, assess the difference that reading, discussing, and writing have made in students; everything should be articulable, subject to “improvement” in a theoretically endless upward spiral – and all of it documented.)

The UGM notices that the “new economic relations” (p. 24) and such enterprises are focused on “the universal future reasonableness” (p. 25) and the “future man” (p. 28). Perhaps he would agree that this is a key difference between his (and our) society and those of the past. In former times people hoped for good rulers who would enable their subjects to preserve a heritage (whether of property, law, literature, etc.) and pass it intact to their children. In modern times people have “leaders” who engage in social engineering and neglect the transmission of the wisdom of the past. Thus in a university English department, a faculty member may lament the situation if students read canonical literary works and press instead for the students to read more secondary writing, i.e. articles by the academic careerists of the moment, who focus on a “progressive” social agenda, usually approximately the same one as government and the entertainment industry – in fact these, and education, and social services, and much more become, in effect, a united enterprise. But the UGM feels testy about the social agendas of his day and the devotion to “progress” that will build a great “crystal palace” (p. 25) or utopia.

The price of utopia is the minimization or extinction of free will (p. 26). It is interesting to see how, in our own time, the previous generation’s agitation (often naïve or self-serving) for freedom is giving way to a passion for “equality.” One hears calls not so much for some people to be able to participate in privileges that might formerly have not been available to them, but rather that the “privileges” of some should be taken away from them. Now “privilege” largely means the freedom to do and to enjoy. Some people will make better use of such privileges. A left-wing agenda will seek to diminish the privileges (i.e. freedom) that some have enjoyed. Often, the idea is that the allegedly privileged person should give up some of his freedom since others don’t enjoy it so much – rather than that others should have such privilege too, as was often the hope a generation ago (e.g. in the Civil Rights era). In the utopia of the social planners, people should desire what government, education, etc. can give them, and everyone should be content to be managed.
 
The first and shorter of the book’s two parts conclude in a way such that the reader is bound to have been frustrated, exasperated: Is the UGM writing for anyone other than himself? Is he telling the truth? – and so on.

As I read page 35, I found myself wondering if it would be helpful to compare the book to the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, in which King Solomon’s thoughts return repeatedly to the idea that life is experienced as a cycle of vanity. Is the UGM saying something of the sort? But if he is saying “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” or emptiness, we don’t want to say to ourselves: “Okay, so that’s it, got it” …. and leave the book alone.

We could turn from thought of the ancient Hebrew book to our own time. It has been the belief of progressives for many decades that, basically, if people’s material needs were met and if they had a reasonable amount of freedom, they would be happy, and so investing almost any amount of effort and money in education, law, government, etc. to bring this situation about was justified. In North America and Europe, by and large people’s material needs are more than met. They have health care beyond the capacity of their forbears to imagine. They have food in super-abundance, etc. Yet, to take young people for example, in the U. S., suicide is the third leading cause of death (#1 unintentional injuries, #2 homicide), according to the Center for Disease Control.

The UGM at last divulges that he thirsts for something that he has not found (p. 37). In our time, the message often conveyed is that what everyone thirsts for is to be found in the realm of sexuality. The UGM will tell us something of his sexual experience in the second and longer part of the book.
 
If anyone's reading Notes from Underground....by now you might be struggling with Dostoevsky's small book -- or maybe it is flying by as you read. But in any event, you might find that the passage beginning on the bottom of page 66 is helpful for understanding some of the Underground Man's psychology. However, it would be a mistake to explain away his ideas as being "nothing but" the results of his psychological experiences. (People quite often do "explain away" people's ideas this way.)


The passage and many others help us to see that the Underground Man is isolated. But keep in mind that, on the first page, Dostoevsky insists that the Underground Man is an inevitable "representative" of "our society."


If you have time, it would be well worth while to visit Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, and peruse some of the pages in Book 6: The Russian Monk. For example, turn to page 303 of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. A little past the middle of the page you will read about isolation, as something reigning in our time. "'For everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. ...each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing himself away from people and pushing people away from himself,'" etc. There is much more in Book 6 that contrasts in an illuminating way with the words of the Underground Man, who yet, I believe, does yearn for that which the monk witnesses to.
 
I just finished Crime and Punishment for the first time. What a brilliant novel. The first half in particular is so gripping. It really focuses on the main character and his thought process. Though a grim setting I found it quite amusing. His friend Razumihin is entertaining too. The second half is good too though I thought there seems to be more characters involved than necessary in terms of keeping a tight story. More adversaries than required. But many others will disagree. We are kept guessing at the resolution until the final pages too, which is beautifully done. Overall a superb story and it is interesting to also read some of the discussions on the novel and such as utilitarianism that it touches on.

I will read The Brothers Karamazov next as I see many regard this as Dostoevsky's best.
 
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A good idea, but don't wait too long to read Demons -- so that you can reread it.
 
I love all of his works, and he is unmatched in the depth of his spiritual quest. He is a globally recognized classic author
 
aaaron_m said:
I love all of his works, and he is unmatched in the depth of his spiritual quest. He is a globally recognized classic author
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I take the books and read Crime and Punishment, Karamazov, Demons/The Possessed/The Devils again and again, but I had to work at it to finish The Idiot and haven't managed to finish The Adolescent/A Raw Youth, so if you have read those & want to encourage me/us -- !
 
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