BOOK REVIEW: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Posted August 14, 2015 by @amanhimself in Books, classics, Reviews / 16 Comments

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Genres: Fiction, Classics
two-stars

Notes From Underground is not doubt one of the most challenging books I have read in years. It needs a reader’s attention from the page one and till the last page. It must be read when you aware that you are conscious and you are reading the book. This book needs time absorb in a reader’s intellect. It has the power of to kick you in your guts straightaway from the first line of the book. The narrator introduces himself as a man who lives underground and refers to himself as a ‘spiteful’ person whose every act is dictated by his spitefulness. Many people would say that Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis are some other contenders.

It is a two part novella and addresses the reader directly. First person narration is contributed by a forty something man, a retired mid-level government bureaucrat, who ruminates in his poor apartment. If somebody remember reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, they will some similarities between both of the work. Both works manage to share a solitary, restless, irritable protagonist and a feeling for the feverish.

This narrator is portrayed through Dostoyevsky’s words as a sensitive, intelligent, idealistic and morally paralysed. In the first part of the novel the protagonist, after introducing himself, complains about everything: industrial capitalism, scientific rationality, and any sort of predictive, mathematical model of human behaviour. He points out that some people love things which are not to their best advantage. His objection continues that the scientific trend is trying to define a way for a society that will function for man’s best advantage and the theory will prove a man to be a rational being and in this utopian society not a single man would need to suffer but the narrator argues that without suffering there will be nothing left that of a man’s desires. With the scientific way, the freedom to choose life in one’s own way also subsides.

In the second half, he takes the reader back to one his memory when he is twenty-four and remembers some incidents from his social life. He then talks about a grievance against an officer who had casually picked him up and moved him out of the way in a public house. The moment was nothing but his resentment knew no bounds. In the same year, he invited himself to a dinner party thrown by old school classmates. They were unworthy, insensitive and thick young men for which he hated them all but he still longed for their respect.

The context of the book is contemporary. Society has its norms and the scientific theory of formulating the society that Dostoyevsky described still exists and is being worked upon in a similar or by a different approach. It might be Dostoyevsky’s most difficult work but somewhere in the book it fails to grab my attention wholesomely. The second half of the book, especially. The idea expressed through the Notes From Underground is satisfying and appealing but the narrative manner in which they are described did not work out for me well. There could have been a hundred pages more or less, I don’t mind, but the Dostoevsky’s writing of the text disappoints me in this. I remember reading The Idiot which I consider is well written in terms of writing.

2 out of 5.

two-stars

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16 responses to “BOOK REVIEW: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky”

  1. Lucy

    This is on my list, I’m reading ‘Note from the House of the Dead’ right now about his time imprisoned in Siberia. Heavy but fascinating stuff!

    Reply
  5. Becca

    I really enjoyed reading your take on this. I minored in Russian lit in college, and read this book in one of my courses. It sounds like you’ve read and reviewed other Russian lit, I will definitely be looking for those!

    Reply

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