Notes from Underground

This short novel has relevance for any individual who chooses to grapple with the onslaught of information that pours forth from various institutions, including modern education and the media. I had read ~Notes from the Underground~ many years ago, and picking it up again proved to be a positive move, philosophically, politically and socially, on a very personal level. The narrator is a 19th century man who has chosen to withdraw from society and rant and rave in a kind of 'neurotic' protest against the ever-prevalent 'rational forces' or normalizing conditions that society is imposing. In brief, his protest is against the popular philosophical view of the time, deterministic materialism. He asks: Is man a free agent? Are his actions and desires his own; or conversely, is he endowed with some Universal nature, where his interests, desires and overall behaviour is predetermined? In his terms, are we "Piano keys", or merely "Organ stops" responding blindly to the 'rational forces' that continually bombard us on a daily basis?This book is an argument supporting the view that irrationality has its merits. We are in danger of ignoring our own desires in favour of a popular or dominate view. What the underground man is proposing is to be aware of the danger of buying into the proposition that there is a collective 'common good', that all people are essentially the same and desire the same things. He goes on to warn that if the men of 'science' are correct, if our desires and interests are the same, if our behaviour can be recorded on some central data base, where all we have to do to understand how we should behave is by logging onto this data base, what hope does humankind have of experiencing individual needs, creativity, adventure and innovation? According to the underground man, absolutely no hope at all.The American philosopher, William James, had grappled with the same argument around the same time that this novel was written. He recorded in his diary that his first act of free will was to believe he had free will, and began his new life on that simple but important premise.Freedom for William James and the underground man is the highest most valuable aspect of our existence. The underground man believed that it was absolutely imperative that we at times go against our 'best interests' even if our free will is an illusion. When considering the barrage of information that continually comes our way, we should attempt to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' according to our desires, beliefs and will - a word of advice from a 19th century 'neurotic'.It is impossible to illustrate the many facets of this important novel in the limited space provided. Therefore I urge you to open ~Notes from the Underground~ and submerge yourself into the ideas and arguments it proposes we consider.

Quick read? I finished Crime and Punishment and thought I'd zip through Notes like a snack before going on to the Brothers Karamozov, afterall, it's barely over 100 pages. Quick read? Think again.Imagine being locked in a very small room with a verbose, insane, brilliant, jaded, before-his-times, clerk-come-philosopher....with a wicked sense of humor, and a toothache that's lasted a month. Pleasant company....are you searching for the door yet?For the first hour, he's going to rant about his philosophy of revenge, the pointlessness of his life, his superiority, his failure, oh yeah, and his tooth. FOr the second half of the book, he's going to tell you a tale, with the title "Apropos of the Wet Snow". Because of course, there's wet snow outside on the ground.I will leave you with this encouragement. If you can get through this book, you will appreciate Doestoevsky more, understand Crime and Punishment better, and probably enjoy a good laugh more than once. Notes from the Underground is not light reading, but it is well worth the effort. And the translation by Pevear, including the translators notes at the back, is excellent.

This is one of the funniest books I have read in a long time. But while being entertaining, it is also a poignant narration of the self-centered paranoia of a man who is desperate for people to like him. Unfortunately, because people never have really liked him, he also has a deep disdain for people. So in his thoughts and in his interactions with people, there are evidences of deep longing for companionship interspersed with a contempt for all of humanity. Dostoevsky is one of the most insightful writers of all time. He has provided us, in Notes from Underground, with a character who is really just the average person placed under a magnifying glass. Dostoevsky has done a beautiful job of showing how painful (yet irrational and silly) people's fears and paranoias are. It is one of the best examinations I have ever encountered about how people desire intimacy with other people, and what happens when others do not reciprocate that desire. This is a short book, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

I've read Notes from Underground twice--once when I was fairly new to Dostoevsky and Russian literature in general, and once after reading many of his other novels and learning a bit about the intellectual and literary climate of Russia in the 1860s from other sources as well. Both times I was deeply impressed, though for different reasons. On the first reading, Notes was simply a very moving, often disturbing psychological portrait of, as is revealed in the first two sentences, a sick and spiteful man. That Dostoevsky could produce this work over 35 years before Freud's heyday was, and still is, extremely impressive to me. What I did not realize on the first reading was the historical importance of the work. For some time, some Russian liberals had been dreaming of creating a utopian state, and more recently the increasing popularity of nihilism (and in particular the critic Chernyshevsky) had led to hopes that the exact laws of human action could be deduced and a rational utopia set up accordingly. Dostoevsky's underground man is a stinging condemnation of this idea, as his behavior shows that individuals do not naturally act according to the best interests of either society or themselves. Though the novel's merits certainly stand alone, it's worth reading a bit about the historical context in which it was written in order to get a better idea of its impact. A few words about the other works in this edition: Dostoevsky wrote White Nights while in his 20s, before his Siberian exile and while he still held an interest in the Utopian ideas he would later condemn. It's a story of a young man and a young woman, both socially isolated, who happen to meet one night and, over the course of the next three nights, fall in love, with, unsurprisingly, a maudlin ending. The book dragged a bit at first, but I found the second half of it very touching and, though a fairly immature work, it was definitely worth my time. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man was the last short story Dostoevsky wrote, and contains a very clear version of his notion of the necessity of suffering for love and redemption, expressed through a man who dreams of travelling to another planet identical to earth in which suffering doesn't exist. It's not a really great work, but it's a quick and pleasant read. The volume also contains three short excerpts from The House of the Dead (the book based on Dostoevsky's imprisonment)--two of them dealing with prisoners' tales of the murders that got them imprisoned, and one a discussion of corporal punishment. The excerpts are fairly interesting, but if this sort of thing fascinates you you're better off getting the whole work, which is published by Penguin Classics.

A seemingly in-depth look into the life of a depressive recluse. The main character gives us many views on everyday people and their actions that should cause us, the reader, to evaluate our own understanding of the people who surround us. (Example: Why people will moan for days before seeing a dentist.) The writing is absolutely brilliant. Dostoyevsky does not seem to have created this character but instead pulled him from the street. The character was not one dimensional, an attribute that I found personally refreshing . The thoughts and emotions are complex and real and were constantly understated, adding to the impression that the book was written by the character himself, who lacks writing experience needed to capture these feelings. The main character views himself cut off and removed from society, rejected by all in nearly every way. He has become so obsessed with this notion that he has created this exact situation as a result of searching for justification of this impression. He has in fact created most of his own misery, and only continues to propagate more. Yet he seem himself as miserable and rejected and finds pride in this image. He imagines himself to be pitiful and also to be strong and fiercely independent as a result of his social isolation. He feels he poses a strength of spirit for being able to endure the loneliness and envisions himself as a martyr. This fuels his ego and he plans heroic acts in order to show the proof of his worth or to win attention and love. He however lacks the courage to complete the monumental self serving tasks he set before himself. Through a strange twist of logic these failures are also seen as something to be admired. It only makes him more pitiful and thus a greater martyr. When these failures are personally humiliating he retreats within in himself. Hating everyone and again fortifying his independence, claiming that all who depend on others are weak. Only to re-emerge more hungry for the affections of a companion. An emotional ebbing between pride of independence and ability to bravely endure the suffering quickly switching to the opposite pole of resenting people in general. Sustaining himself on the imagined praises or pity that he thinks would be lavished upon him if he were to be seen by others as he sees himself. A terribly tragic tale that emphasis the importance of perspective and removing one's self from a problem in order to perhaps gain a helpful assessment of it. The ideas and emotions presented give a haunting impression. The book should be read slowly and turned over in ones mind again and again.