Book Review: Notes from Underground By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

First published in 1964, this novel is considered as one of Dostoyevsky’s most famous novels. Notes from Underground narrates the story of an unmade narrator who had gone underground as a protest against social utopia. This self-opposing account examines the moral and intellectual fluctuations of the narrator and man’s inherent illogical nature.

Some of the dialogues in the novel are as follows:

·     .- ‘I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness’ (p. 10).

·      - Man is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation (p. 29).

·       -Reason satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life (p.32).

·       -Narrating about his office environment he mentions about the officials in his office who ‘talked about excise duty; about business in the senate, about salaries, about promotions, about His Excellency, and the best means of pleasing him, and so on’ (p. 64).

This novel has a very different writing style and plot. I thoroughly enjoyed it!