Does anyone else find this really difficult to read...

i think so

Come on, how the hell does anything he's saying make any sense?

Looks like the map of an underground passage.

that's what good book covers look like

Can someone tell me how chapters 2 and 3 and up make any fucking sense what so ever? Honestly, the stuff he's saying is so convoluted and vague.

It's not supposed to make sense. He's a rambling loser talking nonsense. You might as well complain about Veeky Forums shitposts not making any sense.

KEEP READING
AMAZING BOOK

Are you sure it's not supposed to make sense? Because I've been re-reading the chapter over and over again fucking racking my brain to the point of literally falling sleep - I'm not kidding, I literally fell asleep I got so tired - trying to understand what he's saying.

>P&V

There's your problem.

Do you know what utilitarianism and rationalism are and what was going on in Europe/Russia when this book was written?

The central Idea that should be discussed here is his stance on free will. He argues that man has no free will, that arithmetic is reducing human psychology down to “twice two makes four”, but he says man cannot accept this: “twice two makes five is much more interesting!”. So when a man gets stuck in a routine he might start to question ‘could I break this routine if I chose to?’ even if his routine is completely beneficial to him. The Underground Man asserts that it is just this frustration that explains absurd actions, wealthy men murdering their wives and honest men stealing from beggars, they do it to prove that they can. He refers to this as “the ultimate advantage”, the psychology at the time put forward that animals seek advantages: food, shelter, power etc. So the ultimate advantage for a conscience creature would be an affirmation of their own free will, and so humans go to any lengths, however self destructive or absurd, to attain this advantage.
The analogy of ivory keys is used to describe the kind of deterministic free will the Underground Man believes in.
Man is like a piano, some are tuned differently, but ultimately the sound that this piano makes is determined by the keys that the pianist plays. For the Underground Man the pianist is universal chaos, but the analogy works equally well if god is substituted. “Make me anything, a roach even, anything but an ivory key!” declares the Man who exists beneath the floorboards.
This extreme cynicism and violent spite are what define the Underground Man. This leads me to the next thematic idea: spite.

will skip forward to his ideas.

“It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.”

So the Underground Man cannot even spite himself honestly! He clings to the consolation that his constant existential turmoil that contributes to his ultimate failure as a member of society, is evidence of his superior intelligence! A man of no strong definition who cannot even propose an idea without discrediting it, think now of Socrates’ statement in response to the oracle of Delphi “I know for certain that I know nothing certainly!”. Interesting how quickly this character contradicts himself, between the first sentence of the book and the last sentence of the same chapter his entire proposed perception of himself flips one hundred and eighty degrees, he concedes that he is deeply vain and must talk about himself, but not just out of vanity, he believes that he is truly an intellectual superior, and that his spite for himself must be a product of his intellect. Throughout the rest of the book, the Underground Man degrades himself and humiliates himself, all while feverishly asserting his victory over his imaginary “readers”. It is this ability to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously that is seen in almost every single one of Dostoyevsky’s characters.
This is also one of Fyodor’s signatures: at the beginning of a book an erroneous statement is made by the narrator, and quickly the reader finds out how false the statement really was. This hypocrisy makes the narrator sound believably human, flawed, and alerts the reader to the aforementioned bias.

So to reiterate: The Underground Man believes himself to be sick, believes that absurd actions and spontaneous crime are not absurd in the slightest, and that a complete refusal to maintain consistency or truly defend his ideas is a sign of his indisputable intelligence.

This honestly makes my head hurt.

I dropped it because it was too much like My Twisted World. Not joking.

It becomes a "normal" book once you're done with the Underground part, which is like 40 pages.

Fill in the blank, OP
from the beginning of your edition:
"I am a sick man ... I am a _______ man."

cuckful

man's

wicked

wanted

Take the book back to the shop.

the mistake was reading MTW in the first place. Furthermore

>ick, he's pessimistic and full of ressentiment so its just like Elliot Rodger

CAW CAW CAAAAAAW

lol

>wicked
So this is maybe part of the problem. Because P&V* translate the word злoй in this way, they throw the reader off the trail because the issue in the book isn't a religious one or really a moral one so much as a societal one. The translators even address this word and their treatment of it specifically in their Intro and they get it completely wrong because of a simple-minded insistence on a one-to-one correspondence of words. The better choice of word here, recognized by the lion's share of translators from David Megashark through Jane Kentish, is "spiteful".

*Really it's Volokhonsky specifically, not a native English speaker, who would have made this choice. But Pevear, who prides himself in not knowing Russian, was in no position to catch this or to see past his wife's wooden rendering of the concept.

Man, Russians are pretty based. This is a similar quote from Tolstoy

I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed. The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. From [people of this sort] I had nothing to learn — one cannot cease to know what one does know.
The second way out is epicureanism. It consists, while knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the advantages one has, disregarding the dragon and the mice, and licking the honey in the best way, especially if there is much of it within reach… That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is accidental … and that the accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave. The dullness of these people’s imagination enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace — the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures.
The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired The fourth way out is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally — to end the deception quickly and kill themselves — they seem to wait for something. This is the escape of weakness, for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield to what is best? … The fourth way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer — knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books. This was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position.

>David Megashark
This will never not be funny.

Do you recommend a translation that makes more sense?

tha'ts from his confessions right? i remember this

You know you could just read this in Russian and escape those translational περιπέτεια, right?

I would go with Magarshack, or even Garnett, over P&V for this title. Generally one big criterion for me, for the reason detailed above , is a simple litmus test whether the word in the first sentence is properly rendered as 'spiteful' or something similar.

I know, ever since someone did that the other day I can't think of him otherwise. The best I've thought up for Garnett is some riff on pic, but it lacks something. And of course we have 'Pevearsion' thanks to the following:
commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

>you could just read this in Russian
>just
+1 though for the use of Greek here

>pic
here, thought I had included it

P&V garble everything to the point of inscrutability.

how is being a whining loser in any way "based"?

>Pevearsion
This calls for something equivalent for Volokhonsky.
Vulgarity maybe? I might run with that

Maybe my interpretation of The Grand Inquisitor is not very good, but I've always felt that that chapter in The Brothers is essentially an abridged version of Notes From the Underground.

Interesting; they do have in common the fact that they represent the opposite of Dostoyevsky's thought and were a way for him to expose such thinking to the light of day

I wasn't engaged for like the first 20 pages and I struggled to get through that, but then it clicked and I stormed through the rest of it. So maybe you'll be the same

I see you are a man of action.