Notes from Underground: Difference between revisions

For decades, the Russian social and intellectual elite had been imitating western Eropean culture, in the middle of the nineteenth century. In Russia, a man was considered "developed" and "educated" only if he was familiar with the literary and philosophical traditions of Germany, France, and England. Dostoevsky may have shared this view when he was a young man, but by the time he wrote ''Notes from Underground'' he had decided that that certain mindset was destructive. In being captavated by the west, Russian intellectuals had lost touch with the true way of the Russian life. The life that many of the peasants and lower-class workers still practiced (Madden).