Meanwhile, our new book Tulubaikaporia officially launches this Sunday (and is already available for preorder). In the upcoming months, you might see a few excerpts from it as well as various complementary materials alongside.

Now, let’s talk about the Singularity…

Previous Posts from Underground: Pt. I Ch. I / Pt. I Ch. II / Pt. I Ch. III / Pt. I Ch. IV-V / Pt. I Ch. VI-VII / Pt. I Ch. VIII

Subscribe now

Read more

After finalising Part I with a few more chapters, the translation committee will take a posting break to translate the whole Part II before serialising it, too.

Meanwhile, please enjoy! And consider subscribing to support nova·nevédoma and this project. Paid subscribers can download a digital version of Vanya Bagaev’s1 “Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel” at no extra cost, and receive advanced reader copy of our upcoming book “Tulubaikaporia” when it’s ready (very thooooooon, as well as more info).

Subscribe now

Previous posts from Underground (with some occasional commentary): Pt. I Ch. I / Pt. I Ch. II / Pt. I Ch. III / Pt. I Ch. IV-V / Pt. I Ch. VI-VII /…

VIII

— Lmao! But ackchyually, desire doesn’t exist! — you interrupt me, laughing. — Science has already anatomised the shite out of man by now that we know for certain that desire and so-called free will is nothing but...

Read more

Previous posts from Underground: Pt. I Ch. I / Pt. I Ch. II / Pt. I Ch. III / Pt. I Ch. IV-V / …

VI

Oh, if only I did nothing purely out of laziness! God, how I’d respect myself then. I’d respect myself precisely because at least I’m capable of having laziness in me; at least there’d be one quality in me that seems positive, that I myself could be sure of. Question: who am I? Answer: an idler; now that would be pleasant to hear about myself. It means I’m positively defined, means there’s something to say about me. “An idler!” — that’s a title and calling, that’s a whole personal brand. No joke, it really is. Then I’d have my niche community by right and would occupy myself solely with continuously respecting myself. I knew a bloke who spent his whole life proud of his taste in craft IPAs. He considered this his positive virtue and never doubted himself. He died not just with a clear conscience but with a triumphant one, and he was absolutely right. And I would’ve chosen a personal brand for myself then: I’d be an idling alcoholic, but not a simple one — for example, one who appreciates everything based and meaningful. Fancy that, huh?

Read more

(a bit cheeky) This project aims to recreate Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” with modern vocabulary and setting whilst remaining faithful to its original energy and the type of consciousness FM conjured in this book.

(advised) Read previous instalments of “Posts”: Pt. 1 Ch. I, Pt. I Ch. II, Pt. I Ch. III, …

IV

— Lol, so you’ll find pleasure even in back pain then! — you’ll cry out laughing.

Read more

Previous instalments of “Posts”: Pt. 1 Ch. I, Pt. I Ch. II, …

III

Think about people who know how to take revenge and generally stand up for themselves — how does that even work? When they get gripped by, say, the feeling of revenge, nothing else remains in their entire being at that moment except this feeling. A bloke like that just charges straight at his goal like a raging bull, horns lowered, and only a wall can stop him. (By the way: when faced with a wall, these types — I mean, the NPCs, the achievers — they cave genuinely. For them, a wall is not an excuse like it is, for example, for us thinking types, and therefore people who do nothing; not some cope, a cope that our lot usually doesn’t even believe in ourselves but which we’re always very glad to have. Nah, they cave with complete sincerity. The wall has something calming for them, something morally cathartic and final, perhaps even something mystical... But more on walls later). Right, so this is exactly the type of man I consider real, normal, the kind that gentle mother nature herself wanted to see when she lovingly spawned him on earth. I seethe with jealousy even thinking about him. He’s a midwit, I’m not arguing that, but maybe normal people are meant to be midwits, how would you know?

Read more

Previous instalments of “Posts”: I Ch. I

II

Now, dear readers, whether you want it or not, I want to tell you why I couldn’t become even a bug. I’m serious when I say I wanted to become a bug, many times, read Kafka and all that. But even that didn’t help. I swear, dear readers, that to be hyper-conscious, hyper-aware is a disease, real, absolute disease. For everyday life it would be enough to have an ordinary human consciousness, that is a half, a quarter as much as the portion that gets dumped on a developed human in our miserable twenty-first century and, furthermore, who has the bad luck to dwell in Moscow, the most self-obsessed and performative city on the whole planet. (There are cities with and without main character syndrome). It would be totally enough, for example, the kind of consciousness that so-called midwits have. I bet you think that I write this because I’m so cliché, thinking I’m on the right side of the curve and enjoy showing it off like some do. But dear readers, who would boast about his disease and show it off?

Read more

The catalyst for its creation was simple — seeing countless out-of-context badly translated quotes from the novella, as well as generally solemn “philosophical” aura around it. The book is, on contrary, a comedy, but archaic translations completely bury its manic, self-contradictory energy, so it becomes hard, almost impossible to see that behind “the wise voice from the 19th century.” So, the idea is to rip it off from that aspect completely and hopefully look at it from a new — if not originally intended — angle. It still does follow the original text faithfully when it comes to wording, syntax, speech cadence, etc. — you can see how little I changed if you know Russian; it is a translation — only with modernised setting and historical detail, so we could also see how the same psychology manifests now.

In a letter to his brother Mikhail, Dostoevsky himself described the tone as “strange, harsh and wild”, adding, “it might not be liked; therefore, poetry must soften everything and carry it through”. It’s easy to be enamoured by that poetry — even in Russian — especially when it’s so poetic and articulate, and confuse the satire on an incoherent and contradictory worldview with a philosophical treatise, especially when it at times strikes the “literally me” nerve so much.

So, “Notes from Underground” is a deadpan cringe comedy about an exhausting and ridiculous armchair philosopher who mistakes neurotic paralysis for sophisticated intelligence who would absolutely go up on an open-mic stage and do unhinged stand-up screeds about his wretched life. Or post it on Substack at 3am.

Thus we would have what I shall call “Posts from Underground”.

I

I’m a sick man… I’m a spiteful man. Unattractive man I am. I think I have depression. Although I don’t understand anything about my condition and don’t know whether I have it at all. I’m not in therapy and never been to therapy, though I respect psychology and have read Freud. Besides, I constantly self-diagnose; well, at least enough to respect the profession (I’m smart enough not to self-diagnose, but also educated enough to self-diagnose). Nah, I won’t go to therapy out of spite. You won’t understand it. But I do understand. I obviously can’t explain to you for whom exactly things are worse because of my spite; I know perfectly well that I’m not hurting therapists by not going to therapy; I know better than anyone that I’m only fucking myself over with all this and nobody else. But still, if I don’t go to therapy, it’s out of spite. I’m depressed, so let me get even more depressed!

I’ve been living like that for a while — maybe twenty years. Now I’m forty. I used to work, now I don’t. I was a toxic IT support guy. I was rude and took pleasure in it. I mean, I didn’t steal company equipment, so I had to compensate myself somehow (Bad joke; but I won’t delete it. I wrote it thinking it was witty, but now that I see I just wanted to show off pathetically — I’m deliberately leaving it in!) When users would come to my desk with their tickets, I’d grind my teeth at them and feel inexorable pleasure when I managed to upset someone. Almost always managed to. Mostly they were all timid types: you know — users. But among the self-important ones there was some middle manager I especially couldn’t stand. He refused to submit and kept stubbornly following up on tickets. I had a war with him over his tickets for a year and a half. I finally broke him. He stopped following up. Though this happened when I was younger. But do you know, dear readers, what the main point of my spite was? The whole thing, the nastiest thing, was the every minute, even in moments of my strongest bile, I shamefully realised that I was not only not spiteful, but not even a bitter person, that I was just barking at shadows for nothing and amusing myself with it. I’m foaming at my mouth, but bring me some little treat — a cup of coffee or whatnot — and I’ll calm down. I’ll even feel touched, though afterwards I’ll grind my teeth at myself and suffer from insomnia for months. That’s just my way.

I lied to you above, lied that I was a toxic IT guy. Lied out of spite. I was just messing around with the users and that one guy, but in reality I could never be mean to anyone. I was constantly aware of many, many other feelings opposite to that. I felt them swarming in me, these opposite feelings. I knew they’d been swarming in me my whole life and trying to get out, but I wouldn’t let them, I didn’t, never did. They tortured me to the point of shame, brought me to convulsions and — I was completely fed up with them! Don’t you reckon, dear readers, that I’m repenting something before you now, that I’m asking your forgiveness for something?… I’m sure that you do reckon… But anyway, I assure you, I don’t care even if you do…

I not only failed to become mean, I failed to become anything, really: not mean, not good, not scum, not decent, not a hero, not even a bug. Now I’m rotting away in my hole, mocking myself with the spiteful and completely useless consolation that an intelligent person cannot really become anything, and only an idiot becomes something. Indeed, an intelligent person of the twenty first century must and is morally obligated to be essentially a characterless being; while a person with a character, an achiever, is essentially an NPC. This is my belief at forty. I’m forty now, and forty years is where your life ends. To live past forty is vulgar, immoral and degenerate. Tell me, who lives past forty, honestly? I’ll tell you who: NPCs and grifters live past forty. I’ll say this to all boomers’ faces, all these respectable boomers who “lived through worse in the 90s” and won’t shut up about it! I’ll say this the whole world’s face! I have the right to say this because I myself will live to sixty. I’ll live to seventy! To eighty!… Wait! Let me catch my breath…

You probably think, dear readers, that I’m here to make you laugh? You’re wrong at that, too. I’m not some shitposter you think I am, or maybe think I am; however, if you, pissed off with all my rambling (and I can feel you are), decide to ask me, what am I then? I’ll tell you: I’m that guy from IT. I worked to pay the bills (and only for that), and when last year one of my distant relatives left me a room in a communal flat in their will, I immediately quit and holed up in my corner. I lived in this corner before, but now I really feel settled. My room is shitty, in a Soviet building on the edge of Moscow. The woman I share the kitchen and bathroom with is old, mean from stupidity, and she always smells bad on top of it. People tell me that Moscow is bad for my mental health and that with my pathetic means it’s very expensive to live in Moscow. I know all this, know it better than all these experienced and wise advisors and those who nod along. But I’m staying in Moscow; I won’t leave Moscow! I’m not leaving because… Ah! Who cares whether I leave it or not.

But anyway: what can any decent man talk about with the most pleasure?

Answer: himself.

Well then, I’ll talk about myself.

Subscribe now

» Next chapters «