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Title: Notes from Underground White Nights the Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Selections from the House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Andrew R. Macandrew ISBN: 0-451-52376-8 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: June, 1980 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (84 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Notes from Underground
Comment: Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" is an existential classic. This book, like many of Dostoevsky's works, intertwines the notions of literature and philosophy, probing the depths of aesthetic contemplation through philosophy. Dostoevsky, used this manuscript as a testing or training ground for later ideas he would explore in his groundbreaking and notorious books such as "Crime and Punishment,""Brothers Karamazov," and "the Idiot." Also central to the theme of the writing one will enciounter many notions of autonomy, or freedom of the individual. The main character, "the Underground man," performs many absurd actions, often in spite of his own self. However, this deals with the notion as Sartre later expressed, is it better for the individual to choose for him or herself and be wrongs sometimes or once in a while, then to have others choose for oneself? The protagonist, is continuously struggling, with himself and the existential burden of constructing and being soley responsible for ones own existence, for owns own counciousness. "Notes from Underground" is a magnificent, psychological exploration, into the mind of the individual, free, autonomous and choosing completley for oneself, which is anything but an easy matter.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Celebration of Freedom and the Irrational.
Comment: This short novel has relevance for any individual who chooses to grapple with the onslaught of information that pours forth from various institutions, including modern education and the media. I had read ~Notes from the Underground~ many years ago, and picking it up again proved to be a positive move, philosophically, politically and socially, on a very personal level. The narrator is a 19th century man who has chosen to withdraw from society and rant and rave in a kind of 'neurotic' protest against the ever-prevalent 'rational forces' or normalizing conditions that society is imposing. In brief, his protest is against the popular philosophical view of the time, deterministic materialism. He asks: Is man a free agent? Are his actions and desires his own; or conversely, is he endowed with some Universal nature, where his interests, desires and overall behaviour is predetermined? In his terms, are we "Piano keys", or merely "Organ stops" responding blindly to the 'rational forces' that continually bombard us on a daily basis?
This book is an argument supporting the view that irrationality has its merits. We are in danger of ignoring our own desires in favour of a popular or dominate view. What the underground man is proposing is to be aware of the danger of buying into the proposition that there is a collective 'common good', that all people are essentially the same and desire the same things. He goes on to warn that if the men of 'science' are correct, if our desires and interests are the same, if our behaviour can be recorded on some central data base, where all we have to do to understand how we should behave is by logging onto this data base, what hope does humankind have of experiencing individual needs, creativity, adventure and innovation? According to the underground man, absolutely no hope at all.
The American philosopher, William James, had grappled with the same argument around the same time that this novel was written. He recorded in his diary that his first act of free will was to believe he had free will, and began his new life on that simple but important premise.
Freedom for William James and the underground man is the highest most valuable aspect of our existence. The underground man believed that it was absolutely imperative that we at times go against our 'best interests' even if our free will is an illusion. When considering the barrage of information that continually comes our way, we should attempt to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' according to our desires, beliefs and will - a word of advice from a 19th century 'neurotic'.
It is impossible to illustrate the many facets of this important novel in the limited space provided. Therefore I urge you to open ~Notes from the Underground~ and submerge yourself into the ideas and arguments it proposes we consider.
Rating: 1
Summary: A Soiled Diaper Is Life
Comment: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground (1864) is predominantly a childish, intellectually dishonest, and edgeless tirade against life, living, and mankind. As such, it is entirely ineffective, and pales in comparison to genuinely gripping nihilistic works like Lautreamont's Maldoror (published only four years later in 1868), Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey To The End of The Night (1932), or any of Jean Genet's five classic novels (the first, Our Lady of the Flowers, was published in 1943).
Today's readers may recognize that Notes From Underground might have more accurately been titled Victimology 101, since its anti - hero protagonist, who has willingly dropped out of society at the age of forty, seems to exist in a psychic state of what Carl Jung called "prehistoric kindergarten." The narrator builds a series of small, circular, and repetitive arguments over the novel's 29 initial pages, then gleefully deconstructs one after the other, mocking the reader along the way for ostensibly following his previous lines of anti - reason. Dostoevsky may have been attempting to make a larger point about a particular kind of aggrieved personality, but if so, the author, in conjunction with his narrator, fails entirely to say anything illuminating.
That Dostoevsky's "underground man" ("I'm no longer the hero I wanted to pass for earlier, but simply a nasty little man, a rogue") is bitter goes without saying; he is also cowardly, immature, self - destructive, unobjective, irresponsible, bullying, and almost wholly defined by his petty envy and "everlasting spite" for the rest of mankind. The speaker continually states that he is "clever" and "cleverer" than everyone else; he repeatedly encourages whatever audience he has to laugh at him, since he takes such a reaction for granted as automatic. But there is nothing clever, acute, abrasive, or piercing about his diatribes, and his tepid experiences, as outlined in Part II, "Apropos Of Wet Snow," fail to vindicate his philosophical platform or the outcast position he has chosen for himself.
Unsurprisingly, what sinks Notes From Underground is that its perceptions, debates, and critiques are absolutely without teeth. Is it accurate to summarize civilization as an engine that "merely promotes a wider range of sensations in man...and absolutely nothing else"? Are "all spontaneous men and men of action" active "precisely because they're so stupid and limited"? Do such men "mistake immediate and secondary causes for primary ones"? Are brave men and intelligent men mutually exclusive groups? It is a fact that "an intelligent man cannot seriously becoming anything" and that "only a fool can become something"? Do "normal and fundamental laws" inevitably leave mankind "unable to do anything at all"? Is personal integrity merely a hollow charade played for the benefit of others?
Arguments like these may leave readers believing the narrator more than deserves his self - induced fate and that any society would be better off without him. Unfortunately, generations of lax, narcissistic personalities seeking some kind of self - justification have taken Notes From Underground as a blueprint and sacred text. But authentic defiance necessitates exactly the sort of conviction, fortitude, insight, diligence, and sense of the relative that are squarely beyond the limitations of Dostoevsky's text. Squabblers like 'the underground man' have always existed and probably always will. It's a waste that Dostoevsky made the effort to give voice to such a character, but little of appreciable merit to say.
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Title: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0553211757 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Idiot (Oxford World's Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alan Myers, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 0192834118 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Demons by Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 0679734511 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky ISBN: 0374528373 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 14 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Konstanfin Mochulski ISBN: 0553212168 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 April, 1984 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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