A review by night3aven
Memorie dal sottosuolo by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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.
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