Tag: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Reading Woes and Zarathustra Calling

After finishing The Great Gatsby, I was again at a loss, as to what to read now. I see this is becoming a major problem with me again. In between I had achieved some sort of stability, a continuum, a balance, which last a majority of the last year, starting with May, where I knew which book to read next, which authors to read, where I was fixated with Russian literature and especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Choosing the next novel was not a problem back then.

Post-December period has not been of that kind. Choosing is much more difficult. The prolificity of January was due to my fixation on completing the autobiographical trilogy of Maxim Gorky and an extremely interesting book on physicists. February was fallow. Reading is sparse in March too. Now again, I was at a loss for many days after completing The Great Gatsby, as to which one to pick. Had paperback editions of Ulysses, The Portrait of Artist as a Young Man(I already have had a disastrous attempt to read this), Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Lolita. Now Joyce and Woolf are too much for my worked-out brain right now, and I don’t want to spend whatever forces I have juggling through Nabokov‘s verse-prose. So I steered cleared of all of them.

And in a sudden fit of conclusiveness, I have started reading Thus Spake Zarathustra. Yes, I do not know what came over me. It was a documentary I saw of Nietzsche in February I think. It was strangly chilling. So is the first few pages I have read. It’s going to be a sombre experience. What with the Gregorian Chants ringing all round the clock on YouTube, I definitely have the knack of creating the perfect atmosphere and mindset.

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.

The Stranger

These days I am getting a bit too lucky. Reading one masterpiece after another. After reading nerve-chillingly dark Notes from the Underground, I came across another secret passageway, which was a little less dark, but much much more melancholy (for me) and as nerve-wrenching and equally lofty- The Outsider/The Stranger.

The Outsider or The Stranger is a novella by Albert Camus. The masthead of his ‘absurdism’, this novel concerns the life a young man who is executed in public because of his ‘unfeeling’ nature and his complete absence of emotion for human beings and mankind in general.

Camus’ novel delves very deep into the basic philosophical question regarding society: Are we bound, living in a society, to a certain set of emotions and that too to a certain intensity only, to be accepted fully and work normally in that society? Is a man, who refuses to regulate his thoughts and emotions according to the convenience and smooth functioning of society, to be in harmony with those close to him, who refuses to be mutually bound by others’ thoughts and emotions, condemnable? Is there no place in society for a man who refuses to relinquish his intellectual and emotional freedom, the true freedom, for the sake of maintaining the masquerade of lies, and false and over-sized emotions, the masquerade which society so cautiously guards against any form of honest and brutal uncovering?

The protagonist is a very ordinary French-Algerian guy, living modestly. When his mother dies, who lives in an old-age home because he cannot afford to keep her, he has to go for teh funeral. That’s when his own free life and independence and ‘cold-heartedness’ starts getting on the nerves of the people.

Divided in two parts, first part shows the life of Meursault (the protagonist), his attendance at his mother’s funeral, neighbour Salamano, friend Raymond and his girlfriend Marie. Among his benefactors we find Meursault very safe and he appears to outer society a very ordinary citizen. But everything changes when he accidentally kills an Arab. It’s then, when the small details of his private life and philosophy are brought to public eye, that this no longer remains just a ordinary case of manslaughter. It becomes society’s battle to preserve its own masquerade, to punish the unfeeling ‘AntiChrist’.

The second part, the courtroom scenes, and Meursault’s recounting of prison life are unparalleled in economy of words and excellence. Camus’ rips apart the masquerade of religion, love, need and faith that humans wear and their addictive dependence of it for making them ‘humans’. He shows the stark contrast in which Meursault stands against the whole of humanity. The last pages, when Meursault rebuffs the chaplain’s offer to repent for his sins and the explosion of anger in which he delivers the phenomenal speech which embodies the core of the novel, of human existence itself, are Absolute Reason itself.

Besides all the greatness I loved this book personally very much. It’s like a sun in the dark, one of those very far and few in this world, which illuminate others from its own light, and not from the light reflected and sifted from throughout the centuries. It creates its own light.

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