Cosmic Arcata’s Kindle Notes & Highlights for Demons

He fondly loved, for instance, his position as a “persecuted” man and, so to speak, an “exile.” There is a sort of traditional glamour about those two little words that fascinated him once for all and, exalting him gradually in his own opinion, raised him in the course of years to a lofty pedestal very gratifying to vanity.

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Dickens and advocated the views of George Sand,

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the second part of Faust.

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he seeks forgetfulness, and finds it in the juice of these herbs, but that his great desire is to lose his reason at once (a desire possibly superfluous).

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Tower of Babel,

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Tocqueville

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Petersburg as that of a former star in a celebrated constellation.

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Radishtchev.

Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Ради́щев; 31 August [O.S. 20 August] 1749 – 24 September [O.S. 12 September] 1802) was a Russian author and social critic who was arrested and exiled under Catherine the Great. He brought the tradition of radicalism in Russian literature to prominence with his 1790 novel Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. His depiction of socio-economic conditions in Russia resulted in his exile to Siberia until 1797.

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Then

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For several years he studied at the University of Leipzig. His foreign education influenced his approach to Russian society, and upon his return he hoped to incorporate Enlightenment philosophies such as natural law and the social contract into Russian conditions. Even as he served as a Titular Councillor, drafting legal protocols, in Catherine's civil service, he lauded revolutionaries like George Washington, praised the early stages of the French Revolution, and found himself enamored of the Russian Freemason, Nicholas Ivanovich Novikov, whose publication The Drone offered the first public critiques of the government, particularly with regards to serfdom.[5] Novikov's sharp satire and indignation inspired Radischev's most famous work – Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow – in which he emulates Novikov's harsh and passionate style. He too was especially critical of serfdom and of the limits to personal freedom imposed by the autocracy.[6] The Empress Catherine the Great read the work, viewed Radishchev's calls for reform as evidence of Jacobin-style radicalism, and ordered copies of the text confiscated and destroyed. Out of the 650 copies originally printed, only 17 had survived by the time the work was reprinted in England fifty years later.[7] In 1790 Radischev was arrested and condemned to death. He humbly begged forgiveness of Catherine, publicly disowning his book, and his sentence was commuted to exile to the small town of Ilimsk in Siberia

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to go to Petersburg

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the new movement.

For several years he studied at the University of Leipzig. His foreign education influenced his approach to Russian society, and upon his return he hoped to incorporate Enlightenment philosophies such as natural law and the social contract into Russian conditions. Even as he served as a Titular Councillor, drafting legal protocols, in Catherine's civil service, he lauded revolutionaries like George Washington, praised the early stages of the French Revolution, and found himself enamored of the Russian Freemason, Nicholas Ivanovich Novikov, whose publication The Drone offered the first public critiques of the government, particularly with regards to serfdom.[5] Novikov's sharp satire and indignation inspired Radischev's most famous work – Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow – in which he emulates Novikov's harsh and passionate style. He too was especially critical of serfdom and of the limits to personal freedom imposed by the autocracy.[6] The Empress Catherine the Great read the work, viewed Radishchev's calls for reform as evidence of Jacobin-style radicalism, and ordered copies of the text confiscated and destroyed. Out of the 650 copies originally printed, only 17 had survived by the time the work was reprinted in England fifty years later.[7] In 1790 Radischev was arrested and condemned to death. He humbly begged forgiveness of Catherine, publicly disowning his book, and his sentence was commuted to exile to the small town of Ilimsk in Siberia

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he “represented an idea.”

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of women's rights,

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but charges of being a capitalist and an exploiter of labour were showered upon her to her face. The rudeness of these accusations was only equalled by their unexpectedness.

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you, sir, are a puppy and an infidel!”

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but there are spots even on the sun!

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Shatov had radically changed some of his former socialistic convictions abroad and had rushed to the opposite extreme. He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia,

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They got it all out of books,

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At one time it was reported about the town that our little circle was a hotbed of nihilism, profligacy, and godlessness,

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“The higher liberalism” and the “higher liberal,” that is, a liberal without any definite aim, is only possible in Russia.

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Three years later, as every one knows, people were beginning to talk of nationalism, and “public opinion” first came upon the scene.

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But as we never shall work, our opinions will be formed for us by those who have hitherto done the work instead of us, that is, as always, Europe, the everlasting Germans — our teachers for the last two centuries.

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I'm not a Christian. I am more of an antique pagan, like the great Goethe, or like an ancient Greek. The very fact that Christianity has failed to understand woman is enough, as George Sand has so splendidly shown in one of her great 'novels. As for the bowings, fasting and all the rest of it, I don't understand what they have to do with me. However busy the informers may be here, I don't care to become a Jesuit. In the year 1847 Byelinsky, who was abroad, sent his famous letter to Gogol, and warmly reproached him for believing in some sort of God.

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Stepan Trofimovitch succeeded in reaching the deepest chords in his pupil's heart, and had aroused in him a vague sensation of that eternal, sacred yearning which some elect souls can never give up for cheap gratification when once they have tasted and known it. (There are some connoisseurs who prize this yearning more than the most complete satisfaction of it, if such were possible.)

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seemed something repellent about him. It was said that his face suggested a mask;

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“You're for nationalism, then?”

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“The Story of the Expedition of Igor,”

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Petrusha. To begin with, on completing his studies at the university six years before, he had hung about in Petersburg without getting work. Suddenly we got the news that he had taken part in issuing some anonymous manifesto and that he was implicated in the affair. Then he suddenly turned up abroad in Switzerland at Geneva — he had escaped, very likely.

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sire, tout de meme.. . . And you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it . . . second-hand, of course.

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Switzerland

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Can that, too, come from sentimentalism?”

We must distinguish between “sentimental” and “sensitive.” A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother’s Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata. A whole century of authors praised the simple life of the poor, and so on. Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoevski, we mean the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.

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Why look at that drowned woman with the dead child in her dead arms? Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear that sight and turned away from it. Here I stood with my back to it; here I was horrified and could not bring myself to look; I blinked my eyes — isn't that interesting?” When I told Stepan Trofimovitch my opinion of Karmazinov's article he quite agreed with me.

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“He has already begun the study of them, and is writing a very interesting article dealing with the causes of the increase of suicide in Russia,

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one could have heard a fly;

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It's rather as it is in religion; the harder life is for a man or the more crushed and poor the people are, the more obstinately they dream of compensation in heaven;

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The money is mine and not his, and he would take next to nothing from me then.”

If her son married a cripple

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“You'll understand then the impulse which leads one in the blindness of generous feeling to take up a man who is unworthy of one in every respect, a man who utterly fails to understand one, who is ready to torture one at every opportunity and, in contradiction to everything, to exalt such a man into a sort of ideal, into a dream. To concentrate in him all one's hopes, to bow down before him; to love him all one's life, absolutely without knowing why — perhaps just because he was unworthy

Child worship

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I can guess what a yarn he's been spinning. He's a great hand at spinning them; he has a perfect record-office in his head. He's such a realist, you know, that he can't tell a lie, and prefers truthfulness to effect . . . except, of course, in special cases when effect is more important than truth.”

Lying

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Next day I met Lizaveta Nikolaevna out riding with Mavriky Nikolaevitch;

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curiosity, I ended by sticking to my own character. And what is my own character? The golden mean: neither wise nor foolish, rather stupid, and dropped from the moon, as sensible people say here, isn't that it?”

The golden mean

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So I made up my mind finally that it would be best to talk, but to talk stupidly — that is, to talk and talk and talk — to be in a tremendous hurry to explain things, and in the end to get muddled in my own explanations, so that my listener would walk away without hearing the end, with a shrug, or, better still, with a curse. You succeed straight off in persuading them of your simplicity, in boring them and in being incomprehensible — three advantages all at once! Do you suppose anybody will suspect you of mysterious designs after that? Why, every one of them would take it as a personal ...more

Propaganda

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made short work of God. They were squealing with delight. By the way, Shatov declares that if there's to be a rising in Russia we must begin with atheism.

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“Yes! And if anyone blows his brains out for the baby, that's good too. And if anyone doesn't, that's good too. It's all good, all. It's good for all those who know that it's all good. If they knew that it was good for them, it would be good for them, but as long as they don't know it's good for them, it will be bad for them. That's the whole idea, the whole of it.”

You will own nothing and love it!

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“Then I guessed right and you too guessed right,” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch went on in a tranquil voice. “You are right. Marya Timofyevna Lebyadkin is my lawful wife, married to me four and a half years ago in Petersburg. I suppose the blow was on her account?”

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I know that you entered that society abroad, two years ago, at the time of the old organisation, just before you went to America,

Secret societies

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They gave you no answer, but charged you to take over a printing press

The hounds of baskerville

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You a member of the society? What an exploit for Stavrogin!”

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“but you seem to look upon me as a sort of sun, and on yourself as an insect in comparison.

Metamophis kalfka

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“But didn't you tell me that if it were mathematically proved to you that the truth excludes Christ, you'd prefer to stick to Christ rather than to the truth? Did you say that? Did you? ''

Plato

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“Not a single nation,” he went on, as though reading it line by line, still gazing menacingly at Stavrogin, “not a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science or reason. There has never been an example of it, except for a brief moment, through folly. Socialism is from its very nature bound to be atheism, seeing that it has from the very first proclaimed that it is an atheistic organisation of society, and that it intends to establish itself exclusively on the elements of science and reason. Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate ...more

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