●Dostoyevsky went to siberia and was in prison and was put in with prisoners who committed serious crimes because Dostoyevsky was accused of treason ○Had a lot of time to think in siberia → thus wrote notes of the house of the dead (similar to notes from underground) 1861 critical realist writing of prison → powerful and people had no experience of prison so it shared a POV on prison life (what a prison was like as it was not discussed in society) ○Book depicted guard’s brutality + the goodness and decency of some prisoners ●Prison becomes a community → effect on individual judicial brutality (those who suffer) and what that reveals about the individual ○Criticize of prison system in Russia ●Nihilism: ○Rejection of all authorities ○Meaning nothing ○1860s: counter-cultural; belief in peasant as agent of social change ○1869: publication of manifesto catechism of a revolutionary → main attraction for russian nihilism ○1880’s: radical; total devotion to a revolutionary lifestyle ●Crystal palace: ○Hyde park 1851 ○First world’s fair celebrating british accomplishment ○Massive big structure made of glass → new tech that british empire made Part 1 Chapter 1 and 2: ●He is jotting down little notes that may not go together… ●Written in first person ●He projects onto who the reader is (first person) ●What he is obsessed with → the ability of him to choose taken away by science and other things. His agency and dignity is being taken away from him. Similar to the double, the protagonist is obsessed with his image and how other people think about him ○Protagonist in this story obsessed with his pain and his own struggle ○How acute his consciousness is → agency (undermining his own agency)
●Irony: ○So anti rational yet he is so rational about what is happening to him and around ○Everything he says in part 1 cannot be taken seriously → he likes to upset people, he hates himself and the people and doesn't wanna give the people the satisfaction of anything. ○Being predictable is not desirable → as it removes your agency ●The underground man avoids definition, declarations and lots of loopholes ○The loopholes remove predictability and text is unfinalizable and so is the character ●The underground man is writing a specific type of book → genre fiction ○By constantly being unpredictable he is conserving his agency so that the readers cannot finalize him (finalize → character whose destiny is set) ●Character assumes that audience is mocking him → in the double the character also assumes the same (share in common) ●The character a civil servant, reclusive and socially awkward ○Seeking validation for his actions ○The audience for these notes → himself or the audience (readers) ●Conscious individual confession → idea of confessing in which he is trying to make his case in front of the audience ○Society → giving the allusion that there is freedom or else people will go nuts ●
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