Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Book Summary Information
Author: Fyodor DostoyevskyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1993-10
ISBN: 009914011X
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random
Book Reviews of Notes from Underground
Book Review: The "cultivated" man must be a coward and a slave.
Summary: 5 Stars
_This is the first book to accurately describe the mind-set and situation of the modern man. This is because the sort of 19th century man that Dostoevsky described here is modern man- the differences are only superficial. A Western European could not have written a book like this- he would have been too close to the problem, since western European rationalism is the problem. A Russian like Dostoevsky was still close enough to Feudalism and the land that he could feel in his bones that something was profoundly wrong.
_The "underground" writer of these tales is a man that has come to loath himself. He loathes himself because he knows that he is not a true human being in any sense. He knows that he is a cog in a machine. He is told that logic, rationalism, and materialism are everything. He has been told that he has no free will that everything is predetermined by natural laws and statistics. He has even been told that he is no more than an evolved ape, so even his religion has been stripped from him. All that is important is profit and comfort- and to serve the machine in his own minor soul killing way as a petty bureaucrat. This is what has convinced him that it is better to resign from society and live as a recluse. Far better not to contribute to the great, inescapable soul-killing system.
_But that is just it- Dostoevsky is making a point in order to forcibly shake his reader out of his or her complacency. He is trying to demonstrate the unnatural nature of a materialistic life lived neurotically and pettily from the head and not the heart. He is also trying to point out those events in ordinary life that hint at there being something more- things that cannot be described with a formula or a chart. Dostoevsky had found the truth in his deep mystic faith in God. This book was a wake-up call to put others on the transcendent path by demonstrating just how inhuman the modern westernized mind-set was.
_This is not an existential novel- it is a transcendent one. This book demonstrates what a hell results when you forcibly amputate the Holy from Holy Russia. It is what happens when you exile the sacred from all our lives.
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