The use of envy to describe how the narrator potentially felt about Liza is interesting. He certainly envies his former friends. The idea, though, that a man envies a woman he wishes to seduce is strange, and I would need to consider its implications. With both HI’s former friends and Liza he attempts to confirm and then explodes in a self indulgent passion. This pattern of behavior suggests he could envy both friends and Liza. Whereas with his friends, the narrator wants what they have, with Liza he wants her to esteem him, which she does not, so what does he envy? He would need to envy that she is indifferent to him, which he cannot be to himself, and this would set him up for failure. ## X

## IX This idea of being poor and noble, although presented here ludicrously and in bad faith, ties back to my note on the spiritual strategy of poverty.

## VIII

This total loss of control to self indulgent harangues has a fidelity to life. It is interesting to see hope many young men succumb to this, and it all stems from an inescapable to parse complexity and the shame that comes with that failure. — Eh, but then I put too much of contemporary themes into my reading of this antique.

## VII

## VI

To be moved by self pitying romantics, especially when the counterparties stand in opposition to you with true disdain, and to go about in agitation towards others is hell.

This section makes me reflect on how desperate we are for satisfaction when we are in dire straits, especially when there is little chance for mobility in society. A natural response would be to become spiritual, or at least engage in some manner of spiritual athletics, but this comes neither with epaulets or vestments, and leaves the man who feels to acutely his disregard in the same place he started. ## V

## IV

Perhaps here with Simonov does our narrator make more of him, drop his apparent ordinariness, because it is how he thinks of himself, despite his own insignificance. ## III

## II

Select American tragedies might have been avoided in this same manner, if only the American spirit was more neurotic and less grandiose.

To envy or disdain everything by turns is to be nothing.

Dost was likely influenced positively by the romantics he alludes to, but must have felt personally how he was not like them, how he was tarnished, in part by being Russian, or in his philosophy of what it is to be Russian. This analysis of how stuck the underground man is is a deep articulation of his intellectual divergence from the romantics.

Heine and Rousseau, both previously mentioned by the narrator, would, I assume, be examples of German and French translunary romantics.

# II Apropos of the Wet Snow ## I

The underground man’s modern analogue does not even thirst for life, but still resolved the lack of thirst in logical tangles.

## XI

> I have the underground.

The littl'e table is the precursor to the infinite scroll, only the scroll miles a sense of importance that we conflate with proving oneself a man that we are content to simply be an extension of the algorithm. ## IX

Man as piano keys.

Wanting in accordance with a little table is especially interesting when you consider its similarities to Soviet style communism, and I have to wonder if Dost is not pulling this directly from elsewhere, and furthermore if that idea was influential in early communist thinking. *Notes* is published in the 1860s, right around the time Marx's *Capital* is published.

## IV

## III

It has been a minute since I read _Crime and Punishment_, but this idea that any consciousness at all is a sickness reminds me of Sonya objecting to the idea that any human being could be a louse.

## II

This witticism might be clearer in the Russian.

# I _Underground_ ## I Dostoyevsky's footnote here is a simple statement, but the ability to go partway without one's self to voice a generalized complaint, or confession, is one that most people living today have lost. The mode is not one that comports with our standard modes of communication. This mode is not an opinionated one. It requires far more empathy.

_Notes from Underground_ is being used as part of a bookclub to help us learn about how to explicitly support bookclubs on Papertrail. We are reading the Richard Pear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, from whom I have previously read _Crime and Punishment_ and _Dead Souls_. The translation is widely considered to be very good, and another member of this book club, who can read Russian, may have something to say about the translation in her own notes.