Started reading Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground today. Somebody wrote (in pencil) on the top of the title page (library book, I have the Pevear/Larissa translation) » Extreme feelings of the underground man: anguish, caring, inadequateness .. all of which I can easily relate to.
So, even before the first page, I became intrigued. I actually *like* books that are marked up .. to see what others have found interesting. And this one is well-marked.
Wikipedia says it's, "considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel." Plus its main character is a writer whose entries resembles a blog. Another source claims this is the book that made Dostoevsky Dostoevsky.
The book (1864) opens with the very first sentence connected to the second by an ellipsis. I've long-used a shortened version of this technique to connect many of my own sentences. (The two-dot ellipsis.) Never saw anybody else do it, either. Just created it myself. (Which is why you won't find anybody else doing it.)
Three dots seemed too many. I tried using a semi-colon, but it felt .. awkward. (Necessity is the mother.) Maybe some day they'll give my two-dot ellipsis a name .. such as » the radicon (Radified pausing connector), as a grammatical technique to connect two thoughts with a brief, thoughtful pause.
For more along these lines, here's a Google search preconfigured for the query » Fyodor Dostoevsky Notes from Underground book
