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Title: Notes from the Underground by Feodor Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 1-4043-2197-7 Publisher: Indypublish.Com Pub. Date: September, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $88.99

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (84 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: A Slime of His Time
Comment: The first words of this deeply disturbing, but powerful, novel are "I am a sick man....I am a spiteful man." and these may refer equally to the main character and to the author. Dostoevsky has written an amazing portrait of a loner, whose introverted, sick thoughts spill out on the pages in demented brilliance. The novel is a product of European cynicism, nihilism, and inertia, all of which reached a certain height in the paralyzed upper circles of 19th century Russia. Nobody could write such a book without some personal acquaintance with the mean moods of this anti-hero. The main character, who does nothing except hide from the world, is a total misfit, a loser in life at home, at work, and in love---a jerk, a dweeb, a dork, a geek in modern American parlance---yet through Dostoyevsky's clear prose, we see into his wounded soul. "Actually, I hold no brief for suffering, nor am I arguing for well-being." he writes, "I argue for...my own whim and the assurance of my right to it, if need be." He is apart from society, recognizes no social obligation. He argues that suffering is still better than mere consciousness, because it sharpens the awareness of your being, therefore suffering is in man's interest Someone who can argue that is not going to write an average novel. This is in fact not an average novel at all, but a book concerned with the play of ideas, ideas that flash around like comets and meteorites inside Dostoevsky's head. It can no more escape Dostoevsky's brain than a Woody Allen movie can escape Woody Allen.

The plot line of NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND is extremely slim. It concerns an underground man, a man like a rat or a bug, who lives outside, or more likely, underneath the world's gaze. It is a lonely, tortured life lived inside a single skull with almost no contacts with the rest of the world except for a vicious servant. The "action" of the book comes only when the protagonist worms his way into a dinner with former schoolmates. They don't want him, he despises all of them. So, as you can imagine, a good time is had by all. The underground man winds up in a brothel with an innocent, hapless prostitute named Liza. He wishes for some relationship, he immediately abhors the very thought of contact with another person. The result is worse than you can predict, though I will say that it involves "the beneficial nature of insults and hatred".

In the tradition of novels of introspective self-hatred, Dostoevsky's has to be one of the first. I wondered as I read how much Kafka owed him, for after all, the hero here is a cockroach too, only remaining in human form. I realized how much Dostoevsky had influenced the Japanese writers of the 20th century---Tanizaki, Mishima, Soseki, Kawabata, and others. The pages are brilliant, but full of vile stupidity, useless, arid intellectualism, hatred of one's best and love of one's worst qualities, withdrawal from life, and self-loathing. A less American novel would be hard to imagine. But, some of these characteristics are found in almost everyone at some point in their life, unpleasant as that realization may be. I have to give NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND five stars, though I can't say I enjoyed it. It is simply one of the most impressive novels ever written.

Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant insights into psychology and philosophy
Comment: 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.

Rating: 1
Summary: A Soiled Diaper Is Life
Comment: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground (1864) is predominantly a childish, intellectually dishonest, and edgeless tirade against life, living, and mankind. As such, it is entirely ineffective, and pales in comparison to genuinely gripping nihilistic works like Lautreamont's Maldoror (published only four years later in 1868), Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey To The End of The Night (1932), or any of Jean Genet's five classic novels (the first, Our Lady of the Flowers, was published in 1943).

Today's readers may recognize that Notes From Underground might have more accurately been titled Victimology 101, since its anti - hero protagonist, who has willingly dropped out of society at the age of forty, seems to exist in a psychic state of what Carl Jung called "prehistoric kindergarten." The narrator builds a series of small, circular, and repetitive arguments over the novel's 29 initial pages, then gleefully deconstructs one after the other, mocking the reader along the way for ostensibly following his previous lines of anti - reason. Dostoevsky may have been attempting to make a larger point about a particular kind of aggrieved personality, but if so, the author, in conjunction with his narrator, fails entirely to say anything illuminating.

That Dostoevsky's "underground man" ("I'm no longer the hero I wanted to pass for earlier, but simply a nasty little man, a rogue") is bitter goes without saying; he is also cowardly, immature, self - destructive, unobjective, irresponsible, bullying, and almost wholly defined by his petty envy and "everlasting spite" for the rest of mankind. The speaker continually states that he is "clever" and "cleverer" than everyone else; he repeatedly encourages whatever audience he has to laugh at him, since he takes such a reaction for granted as automatic. But there is nothing clever, acute, abrasive, or piercing about his diatribes, and his tepid experiences, as outlined in Part II, "Apropos Of Wet Snow," fail to vindicate his philosophical platform or the outcast position he has chosen for himself.

Unsurprisingly, what sinks Notes From Underground is that its perceptions, debates, and critiques are absolutely without teeth. Is it accurate to summarize civilization as an engine that "merely promotes a wider range of sensations in man...and absolutely nothing else"? Are "all spontaneous men and men of action" active "precisely because they're so stupid and limited"? Do such men "mistake immediate and secondary causes for primary ones"? Are brave men and intelligent men mutually exclusive groups? It is a fact that "an intelligent man cannot seriously becoming anything" and that "only a fool can become something"? Do "normal and fundamental laws" inevitably leave mankind "unable to do anything at all"? Is personal integrity merely a hollow charade played for the benefit of others?

Arguments like these may leave readers believing the narrator more than deserves his self - induced fate and that any society would be better off without him. Unfortunately, generations of lax, narcissistic personalities seeking some kind of self - justification have taken Notes From Underground as a blueprint and sacred text. But authentic defiance necessitates exactly the sort of conviction, fortitude, insight, diligence, and sense of the relative that are squarely beyond the limitations of Dostoevsky's text. Squabblers like 'the underground man' have always existed and probably always will. It's a waste that Dostoevsky made the effort to give voice to such a character, but little of appreciable merit to say.