Don't ask why, but I am reading Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground (1860s) in fits and starts, each day. Keeps that cynical edge well intact. He is, after all, an anti-enlightenment man...or perhaps to ceremoniously initiate this blog, a little quote is in order:
"Oh gentlemen, after all, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted, granted I am a babbler, a harmless annoying babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?"
It is said Dostoyevsky wrote the novel during the lowest point of his life. Courtesy Lesson 8: Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground: his first journal, Time, had recently failed, his new journal was threatened with failure, his wife was dying, his financial position was becoming ever more difficult and embarrassing, his conservatism was eroding his popularity with the liberal majority of the reading public, and he was increasingly the subject of attack in the liberal and radical press. He remarked that the tone of the novel was "too sharp" and "wild" and that "the poetry will have to soften it and carry it off."
In any case, here is Virginia Woolf on the problem that not-knowing Russian can pose.
1 comment:
How is it that I also read the same book a few weeks back. And to maintain the cynical edge intact at the lowest point in one's life is an intense experience indeed.
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