Notes From Underground

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.


A Slime of His Time   June 19, 2003
Robert S. Newman (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA)
57 out of 66 found this review helpful

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.


The Hilarity of Paranoia   April 4, 2001
Bethany McKinney (Los Angeles, CA)
21 out of 22 found this review helpful

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.


Brilliant insights into psychology and philosophy   May 8, 2000
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

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.


Story and toughts of a self made social outcast.   January 17, 1997
25 out of 28 found this review helpful

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.