Dostoievski

About Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky^[1] (Russian: Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский; IPA: [ˈfʲodər mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ dəstɐˈjefskʲɪj] ( listen); November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881^[2]) was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. With the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground (1864), which has been called the "best overture for existentialism ever written" by Walter Kaufmann.^[3] He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.^[4]

Early life

Childhood

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born on 30 October 1821 (11 November 1821, according to the Gregorian Calendar) as the second child of Mikhail Dostoyevsky and Maria Nechayeva. His father, who descended from a Lithuanian noble family, resided nearby in the Belarussian city of Pinsk. Like his father, Mikhail was a clergyman but when he refused to join a seminary, his family divorced. Subsequently Mikhail escaped from home. When he unsuccessfully searched for his family, he gave up and at the age of 20 then went to the Moscow Medical Surgical University, where he was appointed senior physician in 1818. In 1819 he married the eleven-years younger Maria. One year later he resigned from military service to move to a hospital. After the birth of Mikhail and Fyodor, Mikhail was able to retrieve his lost title and acquire a manor 150 verst of Moscow. Maria Nechayeva descended from a family of Russian merchants.^[5]
Dostoyevsky was raised near the hospital—it was neither a wealthy nor a poor home. In his childhood, Fyodor often went with his family to summer visits in Darovoye. At the age of three he discovered heroic sagas, fairy tales, legends and a deeply ingrained piety from nannies. He was soon obsessed with tales. The nanny Alina Frolovna, who helped the family when their manor burnt down, and the serf and farmer Marei from Darovoye, who helped to fight his early hallucinations, possibly caused by the terrible tales, were influential for his childhood. Fyodor also discovered the miserable hospital garden, which was separated by a large grid from their civil and protected private garden. His parents forbade him the contact with the other side, as they intended to shield their children from uncontrollable influences. Fyodor, however, ignored their warnings and often talked with the reconvalescent people. There he also encountered a crime between a nine-year-old girl, who was found raped in the garden. He never forgot this traumatic experience.^[6]
Fyodor's parents placed value on a thorough upbringing. At the age of four he learned reading and writing by his mother from the Bible. One of the day's highlights were the evening readings by his father and mother. His parents introduced him at an early stage to Russian literature, such as Karamzin's Russian Tales, Pushkin, Derzhavin, as well as English literature of Ann Radcliffe and German literature of Friedrich Schiller. Fyodor was impressed by the latter's play "Räuber", which he saw at the age of 10. Fyodor and Mikhail both enjoyed Pushkin's poems, which they learned for the most part by heart; Pushkin's death was a shock for the whole family. Fyodor's father placed also value on a good education. He sent Fyodor first to a French boarding school and then to the best private high school in Moscow, the "College for Noble Male Children". As the school was too expensive, he had to make loans, take advances and extend his private practice. When the thirteen-year-old Fyodor arrived to this famous college, he experienced an inferiority complex towards his more polite classmates. This feeling was often documented on his works, especially The Adolescent.^[7]

Youth

In 27 September 1837 his mother died of tuberculosis. Fyodor contracted a serious throat disease.^[8] Subsequently, Fyodor and his brother Mikhail were sent around May to St Petersburg to attend the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, while their younger siblings were sent to different families. Fyodor and Mikhail had to abandon the academic education at the Moscow college, as their adoptive parents were not able to pay for the schoolfee. Fyodor's career, however, seems to be apparent, as his father expected a space at the academy for his sons, and the political propensity under Nicholas I allowed them a good military professional career. On the way to St. Petersburg, Fyodor became a witness of a violence on violence situation in a posting house; one member of the military police beat the carter's neck, and the carter subsequently passed his pain to the horse through a whiplash; Fyodor betook to this situation on his book A Writer's Diary. At the academy he was separated from his brother, who was later sent to Reval, Estonia due to his poor health and the better studying conditions.^[8] Fyodor passed the entrance exam and entered the academy in 16 January the next year, but only with the help of godmothers, who paid the schoolfee for the unaware Fyodor.^[9]
Fyodor did not enjoy the academy, primarily because of his lack of interest in the subjects science, mathematics and military application, as he rather preferred drawing and architecture, and the atmosphere. The academy was a former castle built for the tsar Paul I, who was murdered shortly after his accession to the throne. Among the 120 classmates, mainly from Polish or Baltic-German descent, he was an outsider due to his different character; Fyodor was brave and had a strong sense of justice as against to the clownish and brutal class fellows. He protected newcomers, aligned oneself with teachers, criticized the corruption among officers and helped poor farmers. Although he was a loner and lived in his own literary world, his classmates showed respect for him. Fyodor was called "Monk Photius" because of his reclusive way of life and his interest in religion.^[10][8]
The first strong presence of epilepsy occurred on Fyodor after receiving a message of the death of his father. Mikhail was murdered in 1839 by his adscript peasant; the cause was one of Mikhail's irascibility attacks. Fyodor continued the disliked study. When he passed the exams and obtained the rank as ingenieur cadet, he was given the right to live off-site.^[10] After his short visit to brother Mikhail in Reval, Fyodor often went to concerts, operas, theatres and balletts, and discovered gambling by two friends. His independence was responsible for the financial troubles.^[8] In August 1843 he received an employment as a draftsman. In the meantime, Fyodor lived in an apartment of German-Baltic Dr. A. Riesenkampf, a friend of his brother Mikhael. Like in his childhood at the hospital, he showed interest in the ill people from the lower class.^[10] Aside this, he began to translate George Sand's La dernière Albini and Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, and upon the advice Schiller's Räuber, Don Carlos among others.^[8] With the help of his translations, he could obtain some money. His job became more and more humiliating. After quitting a duty travel, he was released in 19 October 1844 as a lieutenant. Fyodor was in financial troubles, so he decided to write his own novel.^[10]

Death

Dostoyevsky died in St. Petersburg on 9 February [O.S. 28 January] 1881 of a lung hemorrhage associated with emphysema and an epileptic seizure. The copy of the New Testament given to him in Siberia sat on his lap. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg. Forty thousand mourners attended his funeral.^[22] His tombstone is inscribed with the words of Christ, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (from the Gospel According to John 12:24) – which are also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.)
The rented apartment where Dostoevsky spent the last few years of his life and wrote his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, and where he died is situated at 5 Kuznechnyi pereulok. It has been restored, by reference to old photographs, as it looked when he lived there, and opened in 1971 as the Dostoyevsky House Museum. It is a popular tourist attraction in Saint Petersburg.^[23]


Source Material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoyevsky

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A Voz Subterrânea

Notes From Underground:

Notes from Underground (Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapiski iz podpol'ya) (also translated in English as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?.^[1] The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow," and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator.

Plot summary

The novel is divided into two parts.
Part 1: "Underground"
It consists of an introduction, three main sections and a conclusion. (i) The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings will be further developed. (1) Chapters two, three and four deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering; (2) chapters five and six with intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious "inertia"-inaction; (3) chapters seven through nine with theories of reason and logic; (c) the last two chapters are a summary and a transition into Part 2.
War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history.
Secondly, the narrator's desire for happiness is exemplified by his liver pain and toothache. This parallels Raskolnikov's behavior in Dostoyevsky's later novel, Crime and Punishment. He says that, due to the cruelty of society, human beings only moan about pain in order to spread their suffering to others. He builds up his own paranoia to the point he is incapable of looking his co-workers in the eye.
The main issue for the Underground Man is that he has reached a point of ennui^[2] and inactivity.^[3] Unlike most people, who typically act out of revenge because they believe justice is the end, the Underground Man is conscious of his problems, feels the desire for revenge, but he does not find it virtuous; this incongruity leads to spite and spite towards the act itself with its concomitant circumstances. He feels that others like him exist, yet he continuously concentrates on his spitefulness instead of on actions that would avoid the problems he is so concerned with. He even admits at one point that he’d rather be inactive out of laziness.
The first part also gives a harsh criticism of determinism and intellectual attempts at dictating human action and behavior by logic, which the Underground Man mentions in terms of a simple math problem two times two makes four (see also necessitarianism). He states that despite humanity’s attempt to create the "Crystal Palace," a reference to a famous symbol of utopianism in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, one cannot avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time can decide to act in a way which might not be considered good, and some will do so simply to validate their existence and to protest and confirm that they exist as individuals. For good as a general term is subjective and in the case of the Underground Man the good here he's ridiculing is enlightened self interest (egoism, selfishness). It is this position being depicted as logical and valid that the novel's protagonist despises. Since his romantic embracing of this ideal, he seems to blame it for his current base unhappiness. This type of rebellion is critical to later works of Dostoyevsky as it is used by adolescents to validate their own existence, uniqueness, and independence (see Dostoyevsky's The Adolescent). Rebellion in the face of the dysfunction and disorder of adult experience that one inherits when reaching adulthood under the understanding of tradition and society.
In other works, Dostoyevsky again confronts the concept of free will and constructs a negative argument to validate free will against determinism in the character Kirillov's suicide in his novel The Demons. Notes from Underground marks the starting point of Dostoyevsky's move from psychological and sociological themed novels to novels based on existential and general human experience in crisis.

Part 2: "Apropos of the Wet Snow"
The second part is the actual story and consists of three main segments that lead to a furthering of the Underground Man's consciousness.
The first is his obsession with an officer who physically moves him out of the way without a word or warning. He sees the officer on the street and thinks of ways to take revenge, eventually deciding to bump into him, which he does, finding to his surprise that the officer does not seem to even notice it happened.
The second segment is a dinner party with some old school friends to wish Zverkov, one of their number, goodbye as he is being transferred out of the city. The underground man hated them when he was younger, but after a random visit to Simonov’s, he decides to meet them at the appointed location. They fail to tell him that the time has been changed to six instead of five, so he arrives early. He gets into an argument with the four after a short time, declaring to all his hatred of society and using them as the symbol of it. At the end, they go off without him to a secret brothel, and, in his rage, the underground man follows them there to confront Zverkov once and for all, regardless if he is beaten or not. He arrives to find Zverkov and company have left, but, it is there that he meets Liza, a young prostitute.
The story cuts to Liza and the underground man lying silently in the dark together. The underground man confronts Liza with an image of her future, by which she is unmoved at first, but, she eventually realizes the plight of her position and how she will slowly become useless and will descend more and more, until she is no longer wanted by anyone. The thought of dying such a terribly disgraceful death brings her to realize her position, and she then finds herself enthralled by the underground man’s seemingly poignant grasp of society’s ills. He gives her his address and leaves.
After this, he is overcome by the fear of her actually arriving at his dilapidated apartment after appearing such a "hero" to her and, in the middle of an argument with his servant, she arrives. He then curses her and takes back everything he said to her, saying he was, in fact, laughing at her and reiterates the truth of her miserable position. Near the end of his painful rage he wells up in tears after saying that he was only seeking to have power over her and a desire to humiliate her. He begins to criticize himself and states that he is in fact horrified by his own poverty and embarrassed by his situation. Liza realizes how pitiful he is and tenderly embraces him. The underground man cries out “They — they won't let me — I — I can’t be good!”
After all this, he still acts terribly towards her, and, before she leaves, he stuffs a five ruble note into her hand, which she throws onto the table. He tries to catch her as she goes out onto the street but cannot find her and never hears from her again. He tries to stop the pain in his heart by "fantasizing", "And isn't it better, won't it be better?...Insult — after all, it's a purification; it's the most caustic, painful consciousness! Only tomorrow I would have defiled her soul and wearied her heart. But now the insult will never ever die within her, and however repulsive the filth that awaits her, the insult will elevate her, it will cleanse her..." He recalls this moment as making him unhappy whenever he thinks of it, yet again proving the fact from the first section that his spite for society and his inability to act like it makes him unable to act better than it.
The concluding sentences recall some of the themes explored in the first part, and the work as a whole ends with a note from the author that while there was more to the text, "it seems that we may stop here."

Literary significance and criticism

Like many of Dostoyevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular with Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of utopian socialism^[4] and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and uncooperative. His claim that human needs can never be satisfied, even through technological progress, also goes against Marxist beliefs. Many existentialist critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, considered the novel to be a forerunner of existentialist thought and an inspiration to their own philosophies.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was very impressed with Dostoyevsky and claimed that he was "one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something," and that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the blood."^[5]


Source Material: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground