Reviews with content warning for Alcohol - Memorie del sottosuolo

This was my first time reading Dostoevsky and, for me, his writing is a middle ground between confusing and brilliant.

This is a very heavy and dense book but that completely transmits to the reader the utter caos that is going on in the main character's head. His feelings of not want to belong to the society but, at the same time, being alone. He wants to be left alone but wants to be noticed. He wants to be independent from others but wants to be loved.

Confusing!
Brilliant!

Content Warnings

night3aven's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

Notes from the Underground - review

Dostoevskij is certainly a master when he has to express the deep psychological conflicts and hidden ideas of his characters, but this doesn't mean that he is always also a good writer.
And Notes from the Underground is the perfect example of this.

In fact, I agree with most of the ideas Nabokov expressed in his short review of this literary work at the end of the book.
Notes from the Underground is truly a "concentrate of Dostoevskij", that perfectly captures his philosophical and political ideas, his opinions, his literary tendencies and hints to many leitmotifs that will be used in future books (

e. g., both the theme of the freedom of choice and the woman as a character that "purifies" the anti-hero/main character, recurring elements in Crime and Punishment

).
However, it's easy to say that the book's merits end there: the content is there, but it is too dense and the style doesn't really have any peculiarity or interesting trait, other than being somewhat chaotic and, again, very dense (in typical Dostoevskian style).
The main character is simply horrible (for no particular logical reason), most of his choices don't really make sense and the plot is basically nonexistent (

and let's not even talk about the ending, which is completely terrible and nonsensical; it would be hard to justify any of the things that happened even for Dostoevskij's number one supporter

).
Furthermore, the book doesn't even pass the test of time: it might have made sense for a Russian citizen who had read it as soon as it was published, but the modern reader can hardly relate to the societal struggles and difficulties shown in the book, which are strongly related to everything that was happening in Russia at the time Dostoevskij wrote and published this literary work.

In the end, even the best writers can fail and, let's not kid ourselves, if anything resembling failure ever flowed from Dostoevskij's pen, this is definitely it: as beautiful or entertaining as one may find it, it is really just a complete mess.

The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation...
...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.

Content Warnings

gailbird's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I don’t really know what to say about Notes from Underground. I’ve read it twice now. It was my first taste of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and it made me want to read more by him. Although it is in translation, I like Dostoyevsky’s style that comes through. A bitterly funny, self-deprecating introduction to the narrator and his life sets us in the class-driven system of civil life in Russia of the mid-1800s; however the feelings and ideas portrayed don’t seem at all outdated or unique to the time period, but applicable to any time, no matter how supposedly “modern” it is, and any system of government, no matter how supposedly idealogically opposed to the feudal Russia of this time it is.

The narrator quickly lapses into dark musings on life and the psychology of morality, setting up for the incidents that he stumbles through later. The first third of the book is quite a rambling of philosophies, general descriptions of the man’s mode of life, and his isolation in his hatred for not only the greater part of humanity but also for himself. While it is slow, it is thought-provoking and gives a necessary backdrop for the sequence of events following. Basically, reading it is like getting a view of this guy’s view into his own head.

It’s unsettling, and not always because of how bizarre and perverse it is, because there is that too, but because of how eerily familiar it is. There is something about Dostoyevsky’s writing that seems to be able to elucidate things I didn’t know I knew, or felt. Being so lonely that you impose yourself on people you know don’t care enough about you to include you in their lives, but you go anyway and pretend that you aren’t aware of how little you mean to them, just to have someone to talk to. Being at an event with other people and not being able to speak a word, because the longer you let the silence go, the harder it is to insert yourself. Finding someone you relate to unexpectedly, only to realise that you can’t let the intimacy continue because you’ll lose some critical, malignant part of yourself that you have nursed for years. Doing or saying the one thing that you know will hurt them, drive them away, because you know them… because they are you. The underground dweller finds himself in all these situations, seeing his own fraudulence and posturing even while he enacts it, commenting on it sarcastically to himself, and the reader. His self-awareness is even more disheartening because it doesn’t stop him from doing these destructive things, calling into question whether there is the possibility of change or growth at all, or if some things are just inevitable.

It’s a short book (novella actually) but it feels heavy to read, not because of the writing style, but because of the concepts about humanity, society, psychology, and sin. All things common to Dostoyevsky, and what I will be looking forward to more of when I finally read Crime and Punishment.

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