Notes From the Underground Archive

“At the end of 1879,  the doctors examining Dostoyevsky discovered that he had a progressive lung disease. On the morning of February 28, Dostoevsky told his wife: ”I know I must die today!..”  At 20:38 of the same day...
When discussing Dostoevsky’s work, I often refer to Leonid Grossman’s quote in The Poetics of Dostoevsky where he says Dostoevsky wanted “to introduce the extraordinary into the very thick of commonplace, to fuse…the sublime with the grotesque, and push...
Every example of storytelling, at its root, stems from themes and ideas presented by classic literature. While every show and movie may not be modern adaptations from classic literature, the literature inspires them. Fyodor Dostoevsky is no stranger to...
The charismatic Humphrey Bogart had a penchant for playing misanthropic characters repeatedly. Perhaps the chain-smoking screen legend borrowed somewhat from his personal life when creating loner characters. Bogart seemed like someone who, like contemporary James Cagney, preferred to maintain...
Patience Griswald crafted a thought-provoking article titled “How Would Dostoevsky Have Responded to the Smartphone?” In the article, Griswald noted that Brothers Karamazov painted a picture of a “lonely and isolated” (then contemporary) Russia. Parallels do exist between the...
Spite – noun: 1. a desire to hurt, annoy, or offend someone.   Sympathy and empathy often draw a reader to the main character of a novel. Understandably, authors commonly cast their main characters in sympathetic lights. A main...
Zen and existentialism appear to be bitterly opposite philosophies. At least that how perceptions appear to those who don’t delve deeply into either philosophies. Those perceptions do harm opinions about the philosophies. Zen theory suffers from the stereotypical depiction...
Those familiar with Dostoyevsky’s Russian classics are just as familiar with his strangely iconic characters: Roddy Raskolnikov, the penniless murderer with a Napoleon complex; the Karamazov Brothers, enveloped in all their complexities despite somehow being related to each other;...
VM Productions’ film Notes From the New World may be an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground, a story that affects a wide variety of emotions as Russian classics tend to do, usually the tormenting and psychological kind...