![]() ![]() Why would Dostoevsky satirize this seemingly beautiful and progressive view of the future? How can idealizing human nature lead to its deformation? Why and how did Dostoevsky’s writings seemingly serve as a corrective this tendency?.Love it, strive for it, work for it, bring it nearer.to the extent that you succeed in doing so, your life will be bright and good, rich in joy and pleasure." Tell everyone that the future will be radiant and beautiful. Chernyshevsky states ".you know what the future will be. The novel directly suggests that through enlightened self-interest, we would all arrive at the same conclusion: that working together in a spirit of harmony and open-heartedness combined with scientific methods can lead to a total transformation of human society. This girl, Vera, goes on herself to found a series of workshops where through enlightened benevolence, she is able to transform quite a few other poor women into educated entrepreneurs. In this novel, a poor, uneducated girl is saved from ruin by a series of enlightened benefactors. While Notes from Underground can be seen as a critique of the progressive view of history, government, and human perfectibility in general, the text is also a direct satire of the Russian novel What Is to Be Done by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. While Dostoevsky’s novels never give us final answers, they show how the question of who we are and what is good for us cannot ever be answered with a simple formula and must be rethought by each generation. More recently and closer to home, scientific developments such as cloning, robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering seem to be unstoppable and raise many of the same ethical and philosophical questions. Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China tried to systematically direct and change human behavior through rational control of who we are and what is good for us. Dostoevsky’s critique of utopian thinking predicted many of the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism. It is to this imaginary audience that the unnamed narrator of Notes, one of the most astonishing anti-heroes in all literature, lectures: “I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway.”īy satirizing the hyper-rationalism and utopian sentiments of his time, the Russian novelist forces us to confront some of the more uncomfortable tendencies of modernity. The progress of enlightenment, they believed, was going to solve the world’s problems once and for all. The Enlightenment with its promise that modern science would conquer nature as well as the notion of the perfection of human nature captured the allegiance of young Russian radicals of the period. What may surprise readers of Notes from Underground, written in 1864, is its sardonic edge and philosophical bite. After being spared from the Tsar’s firing squad at the last minute, years in a Siberian gulag, and a life plagued by epilepsy, he went on to write some of the greatest psychological and existential novels in all of World literature, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. It is perhaps no surprise that Fyodor Dostoevsky is known as one of the greatest psychological writers of all time, given his own dramatic history of suffering. “ have managed to capture and differentiate the characters’ many voices…They come into their own when faced with Dostoevsky’s wonderfully quirky use of varied speech patterns…A capital job of restoration.By Stephen Miller and Thomas Johnson, revised by Joe Phelan Introduction “The merit in this edition of Demons resides in the technical virtuosity of the translators…They capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life.” – New York Times Book Review “Reaches as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as is possible in English…The original’s force and frightening immediacy is captured…The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard version.” – Chicago Tribune “The best currently available…An especially faithful re-creation…with a coiled-spring kinetic energy… Don’t miss it.” – Washington Post Book World “It may well be that Dostoevsky’s, with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now–and through the medium of new translation–beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” – New York Review of Books “One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.” – New York Times Book Review Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize ![]()
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