Pan, Pan, Psychist.

Part two, Underground.

So in this section, we're going to give our first reading of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.

Critics have labeled this Dostoevsky's anti-nevella and, quote,

probably the most important single source of the modern dystopia and anti-heroes we'll discuss.

This is a massively influential book.

And out of Dostoevsky's best works is perhaps the smallest, so very, very widely read, and probably the only one of the five great novels we can fit into a podcast series, hence where we're doing this one. Yeah, I mean, I've read Crime and Punishment and really want to read more Dostoevsky, and I'd love to do a series on that book because it's brilliant.

But yeah, that would be just, it would take probably about 20 episodes and we'd get lost in the amount of characters and depth. It's just undoable, unfortunately. So we're going to do notes from Underground, which is from Dostoevsky's kind of middle period. So we mentioned in the last episode, his first novel was called Poor Folk and he wrote the double.

Then he was whisked away to the wonderful magical land of Siberia full of rainbows and kittens and loads of great stuff.

He then comes out of Siberia and one of the, he writes from short stories and one of the short stories that he writes is Notes from Underground.

It's 1864, the gentleman's 43 years old.

This is before he is being recognised as a big literary giant later on in his life. I think it's also worth just reminding us from our first episode as well that this novel is written under incredibly dark circumstances with the slow death of Dostoevsky's first wife due to tuberculosis and consumption. He's literally writing it by her bedside as she's dying and then like Andy mentioned

as well when she's actually still dead as was the custom at the time. Written under incredibly dark

circumstances and it's an incredibly dark novel, a very urban novel, one of the first novels, which includes this very kind of urban setting where the underground man is literally described as being underground in holes and corners.

They're very dingy novel, a very dark novel.

I think his brother Mikal, as we mentioned, last section, dies around the same time.

It's a new magazine which they're publishing. They haven't had great success with some in the past. This one's called Epoch, as we mentioned, the last section, dies around the same time. It's a new magazine which they're publishing.

They haven't had great success for some in the past.

This one is called Epoch.

So we find parts 1 and 2 published in the January and April editions of the 1864 journal Epoch.

We'll most likely get into some of the bits that the Tsarist government censored during the time.

So key bits of the novella were censored upon its publication.

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