notes from underground by fyodor dostoevsky

By this time it is ridiculous to try and perform any act of revenge. Such a man is plagued with an active imagination which causes him to exaggerate any type of insult until it becomes fantasized out of all proportion to the original insult. The man of acute consciousness finds that he cannot even commit an act of revenge because he never knows the exact nature of the insult. In contrast, a person who is not very intelligent can constantly perform all sorts of actions because he never bothers to consider the consequences. This is because he is a man of acute consciousness and such a person is automatically rendered inactive because he considers too many consequences of any act before he performs the act and therefore never gets around to doing anything. Then he suddenly admits that he is not really spiteful, because he finds it is impossible to be anything - he can't be spiteful or heroic he can only be nothing. It's through elegantly excavating the particularities of his era that Dostoevsky strikes upon timeless truths, and with perspicacious analysis of behaviour, tunnels through to hidden depths.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.

In his attempts at social – and moral – climbing, he digs himself into an ever deeper hole.ĭostoevsky chips away at complex human motivation with persuasive stylistic tools, succeeding in being hilarious and heart-rending in a single sentence (after all, 'mankind is a comical construction'), captured in this beautiful translation by Natasha Randall. After a humiliating social occasion with old schoolfriends, he pursues them seeking revenge, meeting instead the 20-year-old prostitute Liza by whom he is both attracted and repelled. As a 24-year-old, his life is 'gloomy, untidy and solitary to a savage extent' and he yearns to be on an 'equal social footing'. He is 'burdened with one ancient memory' and hopes that in writing it down it will 'let go' of him. The second part of the book tells the engrossing story leading to his seclusion. But why does he also love destruction and chaos so passionately?' he wonders. 'Man likes to create and lay down paths, that is indisputable. The lower this alienated antihero sinks, the loftier his intellectual pontifications, critiquing contemporary philosophies on rationalism and free will. The novel's first section is an embittered monologue narrated from his St Petersburg basement. The 'Underground Man' is a 40-year-old former civil servant, an unreliable narrator who – in spite of himself – is 'intoxicated with spite'.

Notes from underground by fyodor dostoevsky