Lebeziatnikov, an obsequious official with a "soft and saccharine" voice, is the first voice to be heard, discussing a card game played from memory with his superior, General Pervoedov.He polemicizes with everyone – friends, editors who reject his work, the contemporary public and, after listening to the underground dialogue, with "contemporary corpses". His writing style is concise and categorical but simultaneously ambiguous and evasive. Ivan Ivanovich, the narrator, is an alienated and cynical writer with a character comparable to that of the underground man in Notes From Underground.However he thinks he will be able to publish his account in The Citizen.
He contemplates returning to listen to their stories, and to visit other parts of the cemetery to get a fuller understanding of what is going on, but changes his mind, saying that his conscience could not allow it. He feels that despite the desire to lose their sense of shame, the dead have a secret that they carefully conceal from mortal men. Ivan Ivanovich leaves the cemetery distressed that depravity exists even in the grave, "the last moments of consciousness". Pandemonium descends, but at this point Ivan Ivanovich suddenly sneezes, and the dead are silent thereafter. A new arrival called Baron Klinevich suggests that they entertain themselves and each other by revealing all the shameful details of their earthly lives, a proposal that is met with gleeful and almost universal approval. Though one or two individuals show a sober and pious attitude to their situation, most of them exhibit a propensity to hold on to, and even reinforce and exaggerate, the moral failings of their earthly personalities. Despite their 'dead' status, the corpses are not only able to hear each other but to smell each other, a state of affairs that Platon Nikolaevich explains as a stench of the soul meant to bring it to a new state of awareness. It seems that physical death is not final death and that here, according to the philosopher Platon Nikolaevich, "the remnants of life are concentrated, but only in consciousness" and continue for a time "as if by inertia". A variety of individuals, all disembodied continuations of their living personalities, converse and argue with each other. After sitting for a long time, his mind wandering, he lies down on a long stone coffin and is shocked to find that the voices of the recently deceased and buried seem to become audible to him. When everyone leaves he stays at the cemetery and falls into contemplation. He observes and contemplates the cemetery – the smell, the newly arrived corpses, the graves, the mourners-some of whom are only pretending to mourn and others who are openly cheerful. He joins the procession but is ignored by his relative's family. It turns out to be that of a distant relative of his, a collegiate councillor with five unmarried daughters. Ivan Ivanovich goes out in search of distraction and chances upon a funeral. He is aware himself that something strange is happening to him: "not voices exactly, but it's as if someone right beside me is saying "Bobok, bobok, bobok!"" The apparently disconnected and random nature of his speech suggests some sort of mental disturbance, possibly related to delirium tremens: his very first polemical engagement is with an acquaintance who has asked him if he will ever be sober. The story begins with a stream of short, self-referring internal polemics with various individuals and points of view by a frustrated writer called Ivan Ivanovich. The philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin regarded Bobok as one of the finest works in the literary tradition of Menippean satire, and argues that it encapsulates many of the thematic concerns of Dostoevsky's major novels.
The sound suggests "little bean" in Russian, but in the context of the story is taken to be synonymous with gibberish. The writer also reports a kind of auditory hallucination of the word prior to his hearing of the dialogue. The title "Bobok" refers to a nonsensical utterance repeatedly made by one of the cemetery's residents, an almost completely decomposed corpse who is otherwise silent. The dialogue is overheard by a troubled writer who has lain down near the graves. The story consists largely of a dialogue between recently deceased occupants of graves in a cemetery, most of whom are fully conscious and retain all the features of their living personalities. " Bobok" ( Russian: Бобок, Bobok) is a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky that first appeared in 1873 in his self-published Diary of a Writer. "Bobok" takes place in a cemetery, perhaps similar to this one in St.
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