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.
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.
This witticism might be clearer in the Russian.
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.
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.
Man as piano keys.
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.
I have the underground.
The underground man’s modern analogue does not even thirst for life, but still resolved the lack of thirst in logical tangles.
Heine and Rousseau, both previously mentioned by the narrator, would, I assume, be examples of German and French translunary romantics.
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.
To envy or disdain everything by turns is to be nothing.
Select American tragedies might have been avoided in this same manner, if only the American spirit was more neurotic and less grandiose.
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.