Netochka Nezvanova

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

obey his master’s orders.

that again was his master’s affair.

yes, he’s a subby-wubby, but this gives foundation for character-development

And where do you think you would have got to without me, with that clarinet of yours that you cannot even play properly?

new theme?

diminutive…?

The devil himself has got inside me…’

‘Come back to me. I’ll forget everything, I’ll forgive everything.

I SWEAR. THE USHKA.

‘Yes! Yes, he taught me more than enough to ruin me. I wish I’d never set eyes on him.’

mmmm yes, consciousness is suffering and intelligence leads to inertia

I don’t think I can live unless you play me the piece you played for the Frenchman. But you must do it willingly.’

But my heart is melting.

three thousand roubles

the three thousand roubles — something he refused out of his own dignity and love for the Italian, is now being given him by his landowner whom he was trying to avoid, due to him feeling like he’s in bondage to him

I am releasing you

don’t give way to drink but study, study as much as possible and don’t let yourself grow conceited!

he suddenly began to grow afraid that as a result of his chaotic and impoverished existence he was losing his talent.

dosto theme of artists and intellectuals in poverty

daily bread.

i realise, and this is not entirely related to netochka, but to the brothers karamazov. sreferring to ‘daily bread’ as a means of living in regular russian speech gives a lot of weight to the grand inquisitie speech. the same thing with the marmeladovs (cnp) being concerned with their bread-salt.

He saw clearly that all his impetuosity, impatience and feverish haste amounted to nothing more than an unconscious despair at the memory of his squandered talent and that it was more than likely that this talent had never been anything very special, not even in the beginning, that there had been a great deal of blindness, of vain complacency and premature self-satisfaction, and of dreaming and fantasizing about his genius.

im sorry this is hilarious

B. noticed that Efimov was increasingly overcome by apathy, grief and boredom, and his bouts of enthusiasm were becoming more and more rare, which was all leading to a state of gloomy and savage depression.

here comes the Spiritual Death

started neglecting his violin,

meaning, he started neglecting art. as an artist, that is already half a death.

he took to drink.

your first teacher, the man about whom you’ve told me so much, aroused the first love of music in you and recognized that you have ability.

WHAT IS THIS FAGGOTRY

…

You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.

NAH. WHAT. THAT IS A HUGE DUSSY THEME. LIKE THAT IS LITERALLY RASKOLNIKOV

What is it that torments you so? Poverty? Deprivation? But it’s precisely poverty and deprivation that mould the true artist.

After that they no longer saw each other.

indeed, people get used to iniquity and would rather stay in it the second they feel the suffering; in fact, they stay in the suffering to suffer. there’s nothing human scum won’t get used to.

in a dreamlike fashion – a little lamp always burning before an old-fashioned icon in a dark corner of the room; then being knocked down in the street by a horse, after which I am told I lay ill for three months; then, too, times during that illness when I would wake up in the night, lying beside my mother in her bed and frightened by morbid dreams, by the stillness of the night and by the mice scratching in the corner, and all the time trembling with fear, huddling terrified under the bedclothes but never daring to wake her up – from which I concluded that my fear of her was the greatest terror.

This is similar to alyosha's recounting of his early childhood memory of his mother. Dostoyevsky, from 1840, writes about the suffering of children lacking a father, and how children go about this world and suffer themselves. This image of an illuminated icon in a niggardly room appearing in a dream-like memory with the characters' mothers present, will prove to be one of Dostoyevsky’s favourite images.

I wanted to beg forgiveness for him and bear whatever punishment myself.

It was, I suppose, the first time I had received any parental caress and perhaps that is why I started, from that moment, to remember everything so distinctly.

From that moment there arose in me a boundless love for my father, but it was a strange sort of love, not a childlike feeling. I would say that it was more like a compassionate motherly feeling, if one can use that expression of a child!

Perhaps my mother was a bit too stern with me and so I clung to my father as if to a fellow-sufferer.

I have already described my first awakening from childhood sleep; my first engagement with life. My heart was wounded from the very beginning and my development began with incomprehensible and exhausting rapidity.

dostoyevsky also really likes to write about the sufferings of precocious children. and how real it is too… indeed, they suffer in a childlike way but they are also all too conscious of their pain.

‘Why,’ I used to wonder, ‘why are other people so unlike my parents, even in appearance? Why do I see laughter on the faces of others, while in our little corner no one laughs or shows any happiness?

I understood, and again I do not know how I came to understand, that there was an everlasting, unbearable air of sorrow in our attic room.

reminds me of ilyusha :(

He was holding me by my bruised arm, which hurt terribly, and I was unable to see anything.

metaphorrrr

I don’t know why, I started crying, hugging him and begging to be taken to mother. I remember that at the time my father’s caresses were upsetting me and I could not bear the thought that one of the two people whom I so longed to love did love me and treated me kindly, while the other intimidated me and made me afraid of even approaching her.

I dreamed of the house with the red curtains throughout the night.

I learnt that my father was an artist (the word stuck in my mind) and a man of genius.

I soon formed a clear concept of an artist as being a man unique and apart from the others.

He said: ‘The time will come when I shall no longer live in poverty, when I shall be a gentleman. When mother dies I shall be born again.’

Then I resolved, dreaming, that my father would immediately dress himself well and we would move into a magnificent house. And here the grand house with the crimson curtains, and the experience there with my father, came to the assistance of my imagination.

I imagined the harmonious strains of music

so this is what the house is for her, then. every single dream that never made it to reality.

She kept hesitating, changing her mind and counting over her copecks as she tried to calculate the pitiful sum she could afford to spend.

At times she sunk into a kind of stupor and kept on repeating something, counting aloud in a low monotonous voice as if the words were falling out of her mouth by themselves.

It all ended most pathetically.

foreshadowing elemayo

Whenever he came to the end of his dance he would stand poised, holding out his hands to us and smiling in the way that dancers smile on the stage at the end of a performance. For a while father would keep quiet, as if unable to make up his mind enough to pronounce judgement, thus purposely leaving the unrecognized dancer in his pose, swaying from side to side in an attempt to maintain his balance. Finally father would glance at me with a very serious expression, as if inviting me to be an impartial witness to his judgement. At the same time the timid beseeching look of the dancer was fixed on me. ‘No, Karl Fyodorovitch, you have not done it!’ father would say, pretending that he found it unpleasant to utter the bitter truth.

Bearing the pain like a Spartan, he continued to dance, ending up in the same pose, arms outstretched and a smile across his face. Then he begged us to decide his fate.

Finally, noticing that we were laughing at him, Karl Fyodorovitch flushed scarlet with indignation and his eyes filled with tears. In a voice expressing ridiculous emotion, making me feel guilty afterwards, he said to father, ‘You’re a rotten friend.’

makes me feel incredibly sad for Karl F. firstly, because of the face-value reading, but also secondly because of the quite obvious metaphor of him being Efimov’s foil. Karl F. kept his love and integrity as an artist and did not let lofty appreciation of his art make way for arrogance. Efimov did, though. they are both impoverished and poor artists, but one kept his integrity and still works and sincerely asks for judgement of his efforts; while the other abandoned art entirely and started to be obsessed with a continued dream, growing wretched in arrogance.

My timidity and above all the instinctive shame I felt for my father,

She started to shout at me and then, changing her mind, stopped scolding me and started telling me what a careless and clumsy girl I was and that obviously I did not love her much if I could be so negligent with her money. This observation hurt me more than any beating would have done.

My feelings were in a whirl because of something that was causing me agonizing pangs of conscience.