‘Notes from the Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I first read this novella a few years ago and found it hard to get into because the narrator is so difficult and unpleasant, but second time around I tried harder, read with much more concentration I think and got much more out of the experience.

It is very much in two parts. The book starts with what might be described as something of a nihilistic sermon in which our narrator repeatedly addresses his readers as ‘gentlemen’ and sets out a deeply pessimistic philosophy rooted in his own experience of loneliness, professional failure, self-loathing and self-pity. It then becomes more of a memoir as he describes a particular night in his younger life and its aftermath when he met up with some former classmates, quarrelled with them, got drunk and wound up with a prostitute called Liza in a brothel. For a few pages it appears that this encounter may have some kind of redemptive consequences as for the first time he appears to express sympathy and even some affection for another person. This relative pleasantness does not, however, last long. The hate-filled, self-sabotaging approach to life soon returns, as does the conviction that acting in as unheroic and unsympathetic manner amounts to some kind of valid expression of personal freedom.

The book was written during one of many periods in Dostoevsky’s life that was characterised by personal setbacks and crises. It was 1864, he was forty-two years old and by now an established writer, but before he was to write his major longer masterpieces. His wife died that year, as did his brother, while the literary journal he was working for and helping to run collapsed leaving him in a poor financial position. Things had been much worse for him before following his arrest for supposedly revolutionary activity, a period of imprisonment, a mock execution and along period of internal exile. But he can be forgiven for feeling very gloomy at this time and giving voice to his anger and misery in this extraordinary and original piece of writing.

Dostoevsky takes his readers inside the mind of an anti-hero, explaining the perspective of someone who is deeply depressed and utterly unable to think at all positively about anything. It amounts to a counterblast against the optimistic, celebration of rational, enlightened thinking that was prevalent at the time following the emancipation of the Russian serfs, the publication of 'The Origin of the Species' and the potential future promise of further westernisation and economic development in Russia.

Dostoyevsky was not the first author to give voice to the interior thoughts of such a man, but was I think probably the first to do so in quite such a sustained and powerful way. Not a pleasurable read, but one that is dazzling, powerful and very memorable.