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Notes
1. See, e.g., the article ‘Seksizm, litsemerie, neliubov’: chto ne tak s prepodavaniem literatury v shkole’ (https://daily.aflsha.ru/relationship/4797-seksizm-licemerie-nelyubov-chto-ne-tak-s-prepodavaniem-literatury-v-shkole), in which a teacher of literature, a graduate of a journalism department who has no skills in philological analysis, apparently knows nothing about philology as a ‘science of comprehension,’ and, as a result, deals with sociology in literature classes, explains why one must not ask the question, ‘What did the author want to say?’.
2. Dostoevskii [Dostoevsky], F.M. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh. Leningrad, Nauka, 1972–1990. Hereinafter the volume and page are indicated in the text in parentheses after the quotation. The italics in the quotations are mine, while the bold face comes from the quoted author.
3. See, in this regard, the works of Archpriest Pavel Khondzinskii ‘Dostoevskii kak ‘uchitel’’ Tserkvi’’ (http://www.ruiuvers.ru/philosophy/logosphere/450438) and ‘“Chistaia liubov’” v poucheniiakh startsa Zosimy.’ In Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul’tura, Al’manakh N 30, chast’ I. Moscow, Izdatel’ S.T. Korneev, 2013, pp. 423–440.
4. See Novikova, E.G. Sofiinost’ russkoi prozy vtoroi poloviny XIX veka. Tomsk, Izdatel’stvo TGU, 1999, p. 99.
5. Dostoevsky is doubtful in the text: ‘I don’t know whether there is such a name,’ thereby emphasizing, as is typical of him, the special importance of what he is expressing doubt about – and how unusual it is for the Russian language for a female name to be used as a male one.
6. See Kasatkina, T. Sviashchennoe v povsednevnom: Dvusostavnyi obraz v proizvedeniiakh F.M. Dostoevskogo. Moscow, IMLI RN, 2015, pp. 429–434.
7. Scanlan, James P. Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 56.
8. Walter Kaufmann, the editor of the anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, which has already become a classic, wrote: ‘I can see no reason for calling Dostoevsky an existentialist, but I do think that Part One of Notes from Underground is the best overture for existentialism ever written. With inimitable vigor and finesse the major themes are stated here that we can recognize when we read all the other so-called existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus’ (Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. The Basic Writings of Existentialism, edited, with an introduction, prefaces, and new translations by Walter Kaufmann (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1975, p. 14.)
9. The allusions to the well-known article by Maksimilian Voloshin both in the heading and in the text of the article are no accident, but it is interesting to note that when he wrote the article Voloshin had no associations with the only text in Russian literature that could be called the precursor to this story. (See: Voloshin, M. ‘Apollon i mysh’.’ In the book: Voloshin, M. Liki tvorchestva. Edition prepared by V.A. Manuilov, V.P. Kupchenko, and A.V. Lavrov (Leningrad, Nauka, 1988), pp. 96–111.
10. [A reference to Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovskii (1842–1904), a literary critic, sociologist and theoretician of the Narodniki (Populist) movement who criticized some of Dostoevsky’s works on ideological and psychological grounds, saying they contained excessive cruelty and violence. – Trans.]
11. The anthill is an extremely important authorial concept for Notes from Underground. As we see, it is directly linked in Dostoevsky’s mind with Apollo.
12. The meanings expressed here are drawn entirely from an intrinsic analysis of Notes from Underground. But we have become so accustomed to mistrust analysis and to trust only direct authorial expressions that the above quotation is almost essential so that some readers do not say that Dostoevsky took the name ‘Apollon’ at random and for no particular reason and that Dostoevsky had nothing in mind like what the author of the article has set forth.
13. The self [ia] is Dostoevsky’s personal concept, which is very important to all his texts, beginning with Notes from Underground (or to be more precise, beginning with the famous rough entry ‘Masha is lying on the table. Will I see Masha again …,’ which was written over the body of his deceased wife on the night after she died). Strictly speaking, the main philosophical problem of Notes from Underground is a person in a state of the self and the possibility of escaping from that state. The self is the boundary that separates a person from the outside world – but in reality it also separates him from his inner world. That is, a person in a state of the self turns out to have access only to this circumference – the line separating the outside and the inside, which are actualized only in each other’s presence. A person in a state of the self is his own ‘stone wall’ (another highly important authorial concept of Notes from Underground) – and nothing else.
14. Just as Christ is also called the sun, the ‘Sun of Truth.’ That is, when Christ and Apollo meet, it is not merely two fundamental prototypes of human existing colliding – two suns of the world are colliding, and they are radically different.
15. See also: Podsokorskii, N.N. ‘Eshche raz o Napoleone iz podpol’ia.’ In the anthology: Dostoevskii i sovremennost’. Materialy XXVI Mezhdunarodnykh starorusskikh chtenii 2011 goda (Velikii Novgorod: Novgorodskii muzei-zapovednik, 2012).
16. Here we must digress from concrete analysis and return to the problem of access to a writer’s philosophy. Why is our approach to texts so problematical when we attempt to draw a direct parallel between some philosopher and a writer? Because the philosopher, after all, has explained himself discursively. And we draw certain concepts, certain attitudes, certain rules of the operation of the universe from his text without additional work. And when we begin, against this background, to see something similar in a writer, it is very often a projection of the knowledge we already have onto the text. A writer is saying something completely different – but since we are already armed with a previous theory, we identify something similar and familiar in what is said, simply because we are much more inclined to recognize (something known) than to learn (something new) – without making any attempt whatsoever to ascertain what these parts mean in the whole of the writer’s text. And it turns out that the pre-existing, preconceived theory does not clarify the writer’s text for us but obscures it from us. So this is where an important methodological principle must be established: we begin analysis of a text – whether we want to find the author’s position or we want to discover the author’s philosophy – not from the place that seems familiar and clear to us and comparable to philosophies that are known to us, but from the place that is unfamiliar and unclear to us and even seems to be ‘erroneous.’ Because this point of lack of knowledge guarantees that we will be free from our own attitudes (or the attitudes of the philosopher with whom we have decided to compare the writer) and from their projection onto the text. That is, it will free us from the knowledge we already have, from the system that will close off to us everything new that the author wants to convey to us.
17. ‘I was simply having fun at the expense of the petitioners and the officer, but I really could never be nasty. I was constantly aware of many elements in me that were the complete opposite of that. I felt that these opposite elements were always teeming inside me. I knew that they were teeming inside me all my life and were trying to break out, but would not allow them, would not allow them, I refused to let them out. They tormented me to the point of feeling ashamed; they drove me to convulsions and – I finally became fed up with them, how fed up I was!’ (5, 100). This is one of the most vivid descriptions in Notes from Underground of what the self is and what a person is in a state of the self. Outside is the wicked, alien world. But inside there are also elements that are the opposite of ‘my self,’ which the hero ‘is not letting out.’ Hence the self turns out to be merely a boundary – not a domain but merely its surface. That is all that is accessible to us as ‘our selves.’ Everything outside and everything inside in this state is alien and inaccessible to us.