Ummagumma

Joseph Frank's impressive, abridgement of his multi-volume biography. [ Part One ]  [ Part Two ]  [ Part Three ] [ Part Four ]  [ Part Five ] [ Part Six ] As I stated in Part One of this series on Notes from Underground , I was immediately drawn to Joseph Frank's massive, abridged biography Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2012) to obtain some context for what I was reading in Constance Garnett's translation.  I ended up reading Frank's entire biography as I read and reread Notes from Underground .  I purchased the Ronald Wilks translation to fine-tune my understanding of the work.  The essay accompanying that translation was also helpful, which I have already written about.  Once again, for a period of weeks, Dostoevsky became an obsession of my life. To come full circle and close out my consideration of Notes from Underground , I want to offer a detailed review of the sections of Frank's biography that pertain to Dostoevsky around the time he wrote...

By Gemini AI. [ Part One ]  [ Part Two ]  [ Part Three ] [ Part Four ]  [ Part Five ] Biographer Joseph Frank called Notes from Underground a parody, a satire. One of many things that comes to mind when considering the work from this perspective are Dostoevsky's use of chicken coops and anthills as satirical metaphors.  The Underground Man repeatedly rails against the "crystal palace" of rational utopianism, contrasting it with images of hen houses and anthills.  These metaphors serve multiple satirical purposes, The anthill/hen house imagery mocks the reductive nature of utilitarian philosophy. By comparing rational egoists' vision of human society to insect colonies or livestock pens, Dostoevsky suggests they reduce human beings to simple creatures driven purely by rational self-interest. This parodies Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and its vision of enlightened egoism leading to social harmony. The architectural contrast between the grand "Palace of...

By Gemini AI. [ Read Part One ]  [ Read Part Two ]  [ Read Part Three ] [ Read Part Four ] I lied just now when I said “The underground is cheap shelter for a kind of homelessness of the soul and this haunts me more than anything else...”  There's something that haunts even more, far more intimately.  The more I consider the Underground Man, as repulsive as he is, nevertheless, I find that share some of his traits.  I am not sick or diseased or spiteful.  People seem to find me attractive, if eccentric.  I do not behave irrationally and find such behavior abhorrent usually.  But I share his generalized anger, his disrespect and disregard for society as a whole (though for different reasons), and his intellectual nature trapped in an irrational human mind.  And that haunts me.  This sense of affinity with the Underground Man is unsettling because Dostoevsky created him as a profoundly self-conscious and antagonistic character who almost e...