Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group (STG), NASA’s first official foray into space research, and Katherine, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as the NACA became NASA later that year. While not a member of the STG, she developed an interest in calculating trajectories of spacecraft and satellites.

It’s not so much that the underground man’s opinions are wrong—surely Dostoevsky thought that many of them were true, however wildly phrased—but that they were inseparable, like all opinion, from personal strengths and weakness, even personal pathology. We are inevitably subjective and self-justifying—that is one of the modern elements in the book. We are also entirely inconsistent.

No, but he spouts many of Dostoevsky’s ideas and antipathies; the book is certainly an appropriate introduction to Dostoevsky the Slavophile reactionary who emerged in his final years.

What the two fictions share is a solitary, restless, irritable hero and a feeling for the feverish, crowded streets and dives of St. Petersburg—an atmosphere of careless improvidence, neglect, self-neglect, cruelty, even sordidness.

Raskolnikov explicitly embraces the arguments in favor of Napoleon as a great man, whereas the implied author, Dostoevsky, subjects them to varying degrees of deflationary irony.

One of the most hotly debated notions throughout Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century was the idea of ‘the great man’.