Wednesday, May 14th at 1:30 pm.

We will read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short novel Notes from Underground (1864). Notes has the form of a written confession by the unnamed narrator. Underground Man at age 40 suffers from “hyper-consciousness” about himself and others, examining in detail what a contradictory person he is: a man who longs for the “highest and best” but behaves badly, as illustrated by a story he tells about when he was in his twenties. In analyzing himself he also provocatively argues against the rationalistic beliefs about human nature from Western Europe that were gaining influence in 19th-century Russia.