![]() Now, when I am not only recalling them, but have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk./shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. Dostoevsky: Notes From Underground11 always avoided them, even with a certain uneasiness. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)ġ9:24 - Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onmuewez.Ģ6:24 - Notes From Under The Floorboards by Fyodor Dostoevsky Zapski iz podplya), also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Also in this episode John enjoys Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo), the debut collection of stories by Vanessa Onwuemezi and, having let it settled for a few months, Andy unveils his favourite novel of the year, Gwendoline Riley's My Phantoms (Granta). We concentrate on his pioneering novella Notes From Under the Floorboards AKA Notes From Underground (1864) and consider its impact and continuing relevance to modern life. He knows he is sick and hopes it gets worse, because after all, “man adores suffering”.Welcome to the 150th episode of Backlisted! To mark the occasion we are joined by authors Alex Christofi (Dostoevsky in Love) and Arifa Akbar (Consumed: A Sister's Story) for a discussion of one of Russia's greatest writers Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was born in Moscow on November 11 1821, 200 years ago this month. A dark and politically charged novel, 'Notes From Underground' shows Dostoyevsky at his best. The work, which includes extremely misanthropic passages, contains the seeds of nearly all of the moral, religious, political, and social concerns that appear in Dostoyevsky’s great novels. The only thing he has going for him is his lucidity, which is no comfort at all. Notes from the Underground, novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first published in Russian as Zapiski iz podpolya in 1864. He is painfully sensitive, “as if I’d had the skin peeled off me, so that contact with the very air hurts”, and is still obsessing over humiliations he suffered when he was 24. Like Notes From Underground, his days are an unrelenting ordeal of envy, spite, impotence, rancour, dissipation, vengefulness and shame.Īs the novel opens, the narrator is 40 - “deep old age”. The apology and confession of a minor mid-19th-century Russian official, Notes from Underground, is a half-desperate, half-mocking political critique and a. The underground man loathes everybody around him, because they are his mirrors. Today's underground man is the high-school shooter, the incel, Mohammad Atta, Anders Breivik, the online shamer, the self-hating troll. To Dostoevsky, such tormented wretches as his underground man, who finger their wounds until their thoughts grow sick and dangerous, are the inevitable consequence of a liberalised society that rejects tradition and religion, promising unlimited glory to the individual only to subject him to humiliating material conditions. Itll punch you in the gut and leave you reeling, but in the best way possible. Notes From Underground pulled back the rock to uncover a festering sublayer of society whose existence literature had hitherto failed to acknowledge. Yes, Notes from Underground is absolutely worth reading. Rereading it now, I see myself as I was at 20: odious, tortured, consumed by rage, obsessing over perceived slights, compelled to act in incomprehensible ways while veering between feelings of worthlessness and a monstrous arrogance. Two short books from the 19th century that stamped their imprints on the 20th century more than most: the Communist Manifesto and Notes From Undergound. Summary Read our full plot summary and analysis of Notes from Underground, scene by scene break-downs, and more. As such, it is a vessel for painful self-knowledge. Notes from Underground is a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky that was first published in 1864. The novel is a scream of human perversity, and the most unflinching study of self-loathing in the literary canon. Notes from Underground nonetheless manifests an independence and self-sufficiency that reassert themselves each time this work is subjected to an attempted critical domination. ![]() ![]() ![]() Dostoevsky's abject, cringing narrator, cowering in a basement hovel in St Petersburg, insists that humankind would rather tear itself apart than submit to boredom or obligatory happiness. Is it preposterous to suggest that Fyodor Dostoevsky prophesied the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and the seething hate-pits of social media? Notes From Underground is a vicious slap in the face to the delusion that man is a rational being who acts in his own self-interests.
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