Fyodor_dostoevsky on George's Blog

Demons

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:12 -0500

We were silent again for a minute. “Cher,” he concluded at last, getting up quickly, “do you know this is bound to end in something?” “Of course,” said I. “Vous ne comprenez pas. Passons. But … usually in our world things come to nothing, but this will end in something; it’s bound to, it’s bound to!”

Summary

Dostoyevsky chose as the epigraph to this story the passage of Luke where Jesus sends the demons into the swine, and they subsequently throw themselves off a cliff. A curious passage, and one that will come up over and over in this book. I won’t bother to write a plot summary because spoilers, and also like all of Dostoyevsky’s books, the plot is the tortilla of the burrito. It serves mainly to deliver the contents of the book. The contents are the conversations. The characters are unforgettable, you have a fifty-year-old child, who was influential once, but is of no practical use and literally runs away from home. You have Stavrogin, a man who can’t bring himself to believe in anything, but apparently can’t stop influencing people with the force of his ideas. You have the power-hungry revolutionary sociopath Pyotr Stepanovich who is always willing to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Last but not least, one of the most compelling characters Kirillov, the atheists par excellence, consumed by an idea, courageous, selfless, and ultimately doomed. In short, this work is a literary masterpiece that managed to divine the future of Russia with astonishing clarity.

The Double

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:30:46 -0500

The Double is Dostoyevsky’s second published work and is a definite precursor to much of his later work. Following the life of a low-level bureaucrat named Golyadkin for a couple chaotic days. Golyadkin is a weak and flakey person with crippling anxiety and bordering on psychotic. After attending a party and committing some embarrassing party fouls he is thrown out into the snowy night in St. Petersburg. It is in this state that Golyadkin literally bumps into his double a person that looks just like him and even shares his name. The rest of the book follows the relationship of these two characters as the double is the inverse of the real Golyadkin and has everything the original lacks. This book was also adapted into a movie with Jesse Eisenburg who is a great match for this character. The style is very surreal and also satirical it is much different from anything else I’ve read from Dostoyevsky. It was also the worst book I’ve read from him, in fact I think he says it best

The Idiot

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:09 -0500

This book was published after Crime and Punishment. Pretty good, definitely not my favorite of Dostoevsky. This book is I think his first iteration on the idea of a beautiful soul. The main character (Prince Myshkin) is a man who is guileless and deeply compassionate. As a result, everyone he comes in contact with assumes he is an idiot. The simple soul is dropped into the current of crazy Russians and you are left to watch what happens and where the soul ends up. While personally I feel like the character of the prince was perfected in story the brothers Karamazov, some of the transcendent goodness of father Zosima and Alyosha can be seen here. Enough of it is visible to make you wish you were a little more like the prince even though the consequences would be unbearable. Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from the Underground

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:31:04 -0500

In 1864, Russia and the Western world was experiencing a philosophical reversal with reverberations that can still be felt almost two hundred years later. One by one “unquestionable” truths were being placed in the dust bin by a cold rationality. The attack on humanity’s placement of itself in the universe started over three hundred years earlier, when a polymath named Copernicus rediscovered the forgotten truth that we are not the center of the universe. Ever since then, the more scientific details that are catalogued about the world, the further man is pushed from that once prized and secure position. There are two main ideas that the underground man (UM) simultaneously seems to prove by his actions and disapprove of by his words. First is man as nature, the second is man as automata, and by extension nature as automata. It had only been five years since Charles Darwin had written ‘On the Origin of Species’ and already Dostoyevsky has incorporated his theory and worked out what he sees as its possible ramifications. Chiefly that of an alienated human that is horrified to look in the mirror and see no-thing looking back. In an opening note to the book Dostoevsky makes clear that the UM is an inevitable product of the spread of these two ideologies. The book opens with the memorable…