Notes From Underground by Dostoevsky Fyodor

Author:Dostoevsky, Fyodor [Dostoevsky, Fyodor]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Classics, Literary Criticism, Russian & Former Soviet Union, Russia
ISBN: 9780679734529
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1993-01-15T10:00:00+00:00

part one: underground

i. Collegiate assessor was the eighth of the fourteen ranks in the Imperial Russian civil service, equivalent to the military rank of major. The narrator had attained this rank by the time he quit the service, a year before writing his "notes" (1864), not at the time of the episodes he describes in Part Two (1848-50).

2. The language here is biblical, reminiscent of many passages in the Psalms, the Book of Job, and the Gospels in which the righteous man is confronted by skeptical critics. Isaiah 19:11 refers specifically to the "wise counsellors" of Pharaoh; "waggers of heads" are mentioned in Matthew 27:39 and Mark 15:29.

3. This combination of terms goes back to such eighteenth-century treatises as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), by the Anglo-Irish writer and statesman Edmund Burke (1729-97), and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The Russian phrase, replacing "sublime" with the less rhetorical "lofty," became a critical commonplace in the 1840s, but acquired an ironic tone in the utilitarian and anti-aesthetic 1860s.

4. "The man of nature and truth" (French), Dostoevsky's mocking distortion of a sentence from the prefatory note of Confessions by the French philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques

Rousseau (1712-78): "Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly from nature and in all its truth, that exists and probably ever will exist."

5. Glancing references are made here to "Darwinism" and to the theory of "enlightened self-interest" put forward by the English utilitarians in the 1830s and -40s. Darwin avoided the question of human evolution from other animals in his Origin

of Species (1859); not so T. H. Huxley (1825-95), whose book Man's Place in Nature (1863) openly stated the case. A Russian translation of this book was published early in 1864, just as Dostoevsky was writing Notes from Underground.

6. According to the General Address Book of Petersburg, there were eight dentists named Wagenheim practicing in the city at the time.

7. In fact, the phrase was characteristic of articles published in Time and Epoch, magazines edited by Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail in 1861-65.

8. A "no-account" or "rascal" (French), from the German Schnapphahn, a pilferer.

9. The Russian genre painter N. N. Ge (1831-94) exhibited a painting entitled The Last Supper at the Academy of Art in 1863. Dostoevsky detested the painting, and here takes advantage of the fact that the artist's name (pronounced almost like the English word "gay") sounds the same as the first letter - often used as a genteel euphemism - of the Russian word govno, "shit." Hence the odd structure of the sentence.

10. Dostoevsky's ideological opponent M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-89) published an article with this title in the liberal monthly The Contemporary (1863, no. 7). Dostoevsky pokes fun at him by taking the title literally. Saltykov-Shchedrin had written an article praising Ge's Last Supper for the same journal (1863, no. 11).

11. The English historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62), in his History of Civilization in England (1807-61), formulated the i.

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