Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

From The Week of December 19, 2010

I'm no Russian scholar, so many will extract from this an understanding of Dostoyevsky's ideas and the politics and culture of 19th century Russia superior to my own. Despite my inexperience however,I have found value here, a powerful message that has relevance to our time, even though much of the crushing inequality that motivated its writing has fallen into the past.

If one set out to create a crucible on Earth, one would not have to go beyond life in 19th century Russia to find a good model from which to build the perfect, hellish test. Socially rigid, manifestly unjust, and bitterly, bitterly cold, it was a country that lost out on the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment, the two key drivers that economically and intellectually powered western Europe into the 20th century. While Western kings were yielding to empowered parliaments, Russia's monarchs remained harsh dictators who, even when they tried to do good, managed only to perpetuate harm and inequality. It is into this bleakness that Dostoyevsky has penned this philosophical piece about a man who, under the weight of so much injustice, cracks and becomes a spiteful, ugly creature who preoccupies himself with petty grievances that, for the lack of anything else in his life, he converts into lifelong grudges that consume him.

Penned in diary form, the narrator, whose name is never given, first relates his dark philosophy and his cynical views on man and then goes on to convey three episodes in his pathetic life which demonstrate why he believes as he does. From his anger at his insignificance to the man who bumps into him but refuses to apologize, to his fury at being alternately tolerated and ignored by dinner companions he considers beneath him, and to his dismay that the prostitute he sleeps with might think him a good man, our nameless antihero lashes out at every one and every thing around him, hating and blaming the society that has made him such a disgusting creature.

Though the sentiment here is made a little archaic by the advancement of liberalism through much of the world, Notes From Underground remains a potent expression of how the society in which we live influences us, to good or ill. In a lawful, equitable society, optimism and idealism are nurtured by the belief that merit is the only consideration by which one succeeds or fails. But in a dictatorial, inequitable society, the opposite is true. Centralized power deprives all but the privileged few of the opportunity to achieve anything meaningful. Merit is tossed aside for favoritism and nepotism, a rigid reality which only ensures that the masses are stuck with no future but the endless repetition of the task at hand. But as much as I can imagine how this would drive anyone insane, our antihero here isn't let completely off the hook. Even if a good life can't be practiced in an inequitable society, it still should be attempted. After all, to break is to surrender, to admit that the oppressive power has won.

This is not an easy read, but it's a valuable one. And though its melodrama is characteristically Russian, its message about the perniciousness of inequality shines through. (3/5 Stars)