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I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness. A real, thorough sickness.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 1864

Literature

The story behind the card

Notes from Underground appeared in 1864 in Epoch, the journal Dostoevsky ran with his elder brother Mikhail. Its nameless narrator is a retired civil servant of forty living alone in a shabby corner of St Petersburg. This confession comes early, in chapter 2 of Part I: he has examined every motive so closely that he can no longer act on any. The book partly answered Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), which pictured a future built on reason and on people calculating their own interest.

Türkçe oku
Size yemin ederim baylar, fazla bilinçli olmak bir hastalıktır; gerçek, tam anlamıyla bir hastalık.
Fyodor Dostoyevski, Yeraltından Notlar, 1864

Yeraltından Notlar 1864'te, Dostoyevski'nin ağabeyi Mihail'le birlikte çıkardığı Epoha dergisinde yayımlandı. Adı hiç verilmeyen anlatıcı, St. Petersburg'un köhne bir köşesinde tek başına yaşayan, kırk yaşında emekli bir memurdur. Bu itiraf kitabın başlarında, birinci bölümün 2. kısmında gelir: Anlatıcı her güdüsünü öylesine didik didik etmiştir ki artık hiçbirine göre davranamaz. Kitap kısmen Nikolay Çernişevski'nin Ne Yapmalı? (1863) romanına bir cevaptı. Çernişevski, akla ve kendi çıkarını doğru hesaplayan insanlara dayanan bir gelecek düşlüyordu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Fyodor Dostoevsky
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