Notes From Underground...missing ending?

[Sevarb]

Okay, I'm writing an essay on Notes From Underground and have read in several places (such as the end of the book) that there is more text that embraces Christianity and was wondering if anyone could help me out.  I've looked for it for two hours and have started to get the same sites again, none of which are useful and the school library has nothing...I was lucky to even find Notes From Underground...

Any help is greatly appreciated...I want to read that last piece, it's driving me nuts.

[MikeK]

Much of Chapter 10 in Part 1 was cut-out by the censor.  This is the area where Dostoevsky wanted to include more of a Christian message.  

It talks about this in the introduction to the version of "Notes from Underground" that I have; that is the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.  I don't have my copy with me right now, but I may be able to post later what it says exactly in the intro.

[Sevarb]

Hmm...I'll check it out as soon as I get to a decent library, don't worry about posting it here, pointing me toward any resource that could possibly help is more than enough.  Doing the work is my job! lol.

Thanks Mike.

[MikeK]

Well, I got my copy and found what I was looking for.  I'll post it anyway, Sevarb, in case anyone else is interested...or maybe for my own sake.  This from the Pevear/Volokhonsky introduction to "Notes From Underground":


When the first part appeared in 'Epoch', Dostoevsky complained in a letter to his brother that the tenth chapter - "The most important one, where the essential thought is expressed" - had been drastically cut by the censors.  "Where I mocked at everything and sometimes blasphemed for form's sake - that is let pass; but from where all this I deduced the need of faith and Christ - that is suppressed."
The published version of the chapter, according to its author, was left "full of self-contradictions."  Indeed, the reader will notice that in the third paragraph the "crystal edifice" ceases all at once to represent the ideas of the narrator's opponents and becomes instead something that he himself has possibly invented "as a result of certain old nonrational habits of our generation," something, he says, that "exists in my desires, or, better, exists as long as my desires exist."  Obviously there have been major cuts here, removing the transition from one crystal edifice to the other - the word "mansion" being left us as a clue to its nature.  We must try to imagine what would have transformed the "chicken coop" into a mansion, what would have made it more than "a phalanstery in a brothel", what would have turned it from an embodiment of the "laws of nature" into a contradiction of those very laws, and how from all this "the need of faith and Christ" was deduced.  Dostoevsky never restored the cuts, as he never restored similarly drastic cuts in 'Crime and Punishment' and 'Demons'.  Various explanations have been offered for this circumstance, some practical (lack of time, reluctance to confront the censors), others aesthetic (a recognition that the cuts were improvements).  We do not know.  But if we look at Dostoevsky's outlines of his ideas for novels in his notebooks and letters and then at the novels themselves, we will realize at least that the scheme barely hints at the surprises of its development.  However it was that Dostoevsky "deduced the need for faith and Christ" in this chapter, we may be sure that he did not add it on as an extrernal "ideological" precept, but drew it from the materials of the work itself.


That is the extent of the explanation in the introduction to that version.  But, if you're on your way to the library, Sevarb, you might also want to pick up a copy of Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoevsky - the third volume where he discusses Notes From Underground.  He discusses that work at some length, and I'm almost positive that he touches on this point in there as well.

[Mogwai]

Thanks for the post, MikeK.  That was very interesting!  You learn new stuff every day...

[Worm]

That's fucking outrageous!!  Someone should find those missing parts, if they even still exist!!  He should have kicked the censors faces in for their bullshit!  

outrageous ..

[underworld men]

AAAHHH most exquisite Mr MikeK.

Now if I could just read them.
It would be good to clarify if the component missing was Dark night of the Soul and the apophatic.

Or if it was faith.