"The best overture to existentialism ever written." Walter Kaufman
In 1863 Dostoevsky published Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, an ironic chronicle of his first trip to Europe the previous year. One of the aspects that most impressed him was the depersonalization that he noticed in Western European societies, represented mainly by London and the Paris of Napoleon III.
Dostoevsky focuses his criticism mainly on French society, whose customs and manners seduced the educated classes of Tsarist Russia. To the flood of modernity that that society embodied, the novelist opposes, with the irony that characterizes him, the "innocence" of the Russian people.
As Nadezhda Gennadievna points out in the book's illuminating epilogue, it is "a sketch, prelude, non-identical twin, to Memories from Underground", one of his most acclaimed works, which the philosopher Walter Kau...read more