Ok, so now I've decided to do a little conversation of a book I recently read by Dostoevsky, his 'Notes from Underground'. This fellow's a rather talented author and has a pretty unique style - it really isn't rubbish when people are able to find subtleties in the artistic manner and tone/device of certain writers, especially when it comes to the Russians.

This book is about the ramblings of an insecure, touchy, tortured, repressed man, who ‘can take pride in his sicknesses’ – for him even consciousness in this world is a sickness, being what he sees as more effusively intelligent than others and he resides in a mire of lugubrious solitude. He has resigned himself to hopelessness and talks about the ‘pleasure of despair’, being ‘crushed by the consciousness of what sort of slime you’ve been reduced to’. The protagonist is basically talking to himself in a first person narrative, but what is known in the literary circles as Dostoevsky’s famous 'tonal distancing'. He feels himself too intelligent to even take revenge on his offenders or even fight back. Dostoevsky explains this beautifully, because I often have the same feelings – " the nasty, base little desire to pay the offender back with the same evil may scratch still more nastily in it than in l’homme de la nature et de la verite, because l’homme…, with his innate stupidity, regards his revenge quite simply as justice; whereas the mouse, as a result of his heightened consciousness, denies it any justice; such a mouse questions and doubts, and is anxious about what to do, all the while spit raining on it from the ingenuous figures who stand solemnly around it like judges and dictators, guffawing at it from all their healthy gullets; he just wipes it all away with its little paw and with a smile of feigned contempt, slipping back shamefacedly into its crack. There, in its loathsome, stinking underground, our offended, beaten-down and derided mouse at once immerses itself in cold, venomous and above all everlasting spite" – we will remember such offenses for years 40 years or more, each time adding more shameful details. Interestingly, my mother told me a story of our Jordanian neighbours, one of them a Mr. Al Jabr, one of the great agricultural historians of the Middle East and now a prominent industrialist in his country, who holds such a similiar grudge against his already dead and buried mother, still at his tender age of 88. When he was young, his father decided to give in his will an old ancestral sword to Mr. Al Jabr, being the youngest of his four brothers. This was because the father realised that Mr. Al Jabr was a fond historian and an avid reader of the classics. When his mother came to the house however, she saw the sword in Hussam's home and promptly asked for it to be removed and placed in the oldest son's house. Till this day the grudge against his mother still holds.

Dostoevsky thinks that man gets softer from civilisation and, consequently, becomes 'less bloodthirsty and less capable of war’. He notes however that we actually now take pleasure in blood – all the most civilised gentlemen do (vis a vis American psycho), to whmo the various Attilas and Stenka Razins sometimes could not hold a candle – they see blood as ordinary and familiar, which is amazing seeing Dostoevsky is not living in our multimedia age of violent films and gory cinema/horror fantasy. Dostoevsky says we are viler and bloodthirsty in a worse sense – quietly and consciously exterminating whoever we have to. Did Dostoevsky envision the Holocaust and the rise of the Third Reich?

Dost notes that ‘man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere liked to act as he wants, and not at all as reason and profit dictate; and one can want even against one’s own profit, and one sometimes even positively must’. This is free and voluntary wanting, at ones own fancy, with caprice and madness. Here, Dostoevsky tells us that the plight of modern man is ok - our downfall from art and culture is not really so bad, we have only freed ourselves from our inhibitions and liberated ourselves in true putsch. Sometimes that which is reasonable and intelligent we in our full conscience can be reasonable and intelligent not to wish for, because that which is stupid and insensible is often the thing which preserves our personality and individuality. ‘Reason is only reason and satisfies man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life – though our life in this manifestation turns out to be a bit of trash, still it is life and not just the extraction of a square root’.

All those men who exhibit good behaviour are sages, with good sense, perfect, a light to the world, loving everything, all we do is shower them with earthly blessings, drown them in happiness so that ‘only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness like water’, and give them so much economic satisfaction that they have nothing left to do at all except ‘sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the noncessation of world history’. However these 'goody goodies' return only lampoonery and ingratitude, and are the most likely to risk gingerbread, do something nasty, the most pernicious nonsense. He will invent destruction and chaos just so he can have his own way, and show that he is not a piano key. By troglodytism if need be.

I finish with a quote from the book:

"Man loves creating and the making of roads, that is indisputable. But why does he so love destruction and chaos as well? Can it be that he has such a love of destruction and chaos because he is instinctively afraid of achieving the goal and completing the edifice he is creating? How do you know, maybe he likes the edifice only from far off and by no means up close; maybe he only likes creating it, and not living in it. Man is a frivolous and unseemly being, and perhaps, similar to a chess player, likes only the process of achieving the goal, but not the goal itself. And who know (one cannot vouch for it), perhaps the whole goal mankind strives for on earth consists just in this ceaselessness of the process of achievement alone, that is to say, in life itself, and not essentially in the goal".

He is at a dinner with Old Etonians as well almost: ‘I could not get along so cheaply as they got along with each other. I immediately began to hate them, and shut myself away from everyone in timorous, wounded and inordinate pride. They crudeness outraged me…I was amazed at the pettiness of their thinking, the stupidity of their pastimes, games and conversations, their hypocrisy, they had so little understanding of the most essential things, so little interest in the most impressive, startling subjects, that I began, willy-nilly, to regard them as beneath me’. They don’t understand real life, I’m not the dreamer. They worship success alone. ‘Everything that was just, but humiliated and downtrodden, they laughed at disgracefully and hardheartedly’.

Notes from Underground is a long story of how a man defaults on his life through moral corruption in a corner, through an insufficiency of mileu, through unaccustom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground. It is a tragic, terribly sad vision of stylistic, situational, polemical, parodical humour.

"We’ve all grown unaccustomed to life, we’re all lame, each of us more or less. We’ve even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real ‘living life’ and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it – like a labour, almost as service. Go on, try giving us more independence, for example, unbind the hands of any one of us, broaden our range of activity, relax the tutelage; we will immediately beg to be taken back under tutelage"

‘I have merely carried to an extremy in my life what you have not even dared to carry even halfway’. The heightened consciousness of the rationalist. Defiant double mindedness of underground man and his intransitive dilemma.