2,641 definitions
The Asylum (n.) is how we persuade ourselves of our own sanity, Dostoevsky saw: we confine a neighbor in it.
Commitment (n.) as a doctrine is invented by the underground man, who must always make what was not chosen look chosen.
The Death wish (n.) is desire for oneself at the weakest point of one's humanity: desiring to be mortal and to be dead.
Freedom (n.) in Dostoevsky can be affirmed only in a genuine conversion, such as Stepan Trofimovitch undergoes at the novel's end.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (n.) lays down his novel like a game of cards played rapidly with no interruption, and the reader must himself remember every earlier hand.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (n.) did not free his characters by dispensing with the laws: the laws secretly control the chaos.
Grand Inquisitor (n.) explains it beautifully: mysteries must be created, because otherwise the common people would understand things.
Indifference (n.) as a mask is easy to keep while the mediator stands still but falls as soon as the idol moves away, as when the underground man hurries after Zverkov.
The Insult (n.) is a disguised appeal to the mediator: the underground man's letter to the officer wants us to take it for horror, which is why it contains only insults.
Irreligion (n.) sinks man deeper into the irrational: first in reason's name, finally in his own.
Kirillov (n.) argues that men cannot get rid of God by denial, since they turn the law of superhuman love into a law of hatred, so the current of desire must be turned from the Other to the Self.
Kirillov (n.) wants to show God that fear of dying, God's best weapon, no longer works, so men may renounce immortality at the level of desire and not just belief.