Notes from Underground

Chilling. Dark. Menacing. And True.

These are the four words to describe this feat of philosophy and literature by Dostoyevsky.

The story is told by a man from the underground or a ‘hole’. Right from the start the narrator makes no compunctions about his thoughts on humanity and on himself. He denounces the society for its falseness on the outside beneath which there is a putrid core of rotten morality, ethical values and twisted ideas of collectivism and social welfare.

It starts by a classic description the narrator gives of himself, as an irritable, hostile and utterly despicable man who has been living in a ‘hole’ for the past two decades. He has been thinking about the society a lot during these 20 years and finally he’s noting down all those contemplations. And he doesn’t give a damn whether you take his thoughts in the right spirit or not. Because they are not in the right spirit in actuality. You can get appalled by them or you can laughingly toss them in the dustbin for all he cares.

He exposes the shallowness of the society he lives in, and goes on in a lengthy exposition about what people expect from a society and what they give to it and to what extent society marks its influence in the everyday life and thought-process of a common man. Moving on to the concept of ‘selfless ideal’ and ‘selfish evil’ he exposes the fallacy of this concept and denounces the collective amorphous faceless crowd that determines the fate of an individual man with a face.

Notes from Underground was one of the most vituperative and most revolutionary texts of the 19th century. It created a furor in the intellectual circles of 19th century Europe when it was published. The views over it in Russia was divided in two extremes, in the wake of the liberation of the serfs.

This book was the first novel to expound upon the idea of individuality which would later become the cornerstone of the edifice of Existentialism created by Sartre and others. Fyodor Dostoyevsky at his all-time peak as a philosopher. He presupposes the dawn of individual as a philosophical entity who would stand tall in the coming 20th century.