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    Notes From The Underground: "To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise."
    Notes From The Underground: "To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise."
    Notes From The Underground: "To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise."
    Ebook155 pages2 hours

    Notes From The Underground: "To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise."

    By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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    About this ebook

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground is both a fictional and philosophical work. It is considered by many critics as an early existentialist novella. The narrative takes the form of notes written by an unnamed narrator and is divided into two parts. In the first part entitled “Underground,” the protagonist is presented as a pessimist misanthrope who comments on a number of philosophical concepts such as the duality between determinism and free will. Basing his criticism on the work of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, he attacks modern schools of thought that purport to be founded solely on logical reasoning, namely utilitarianism and positivism. The second part of the book, entitled “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” is closer to fiction than to philosophical analysis. It rather seems to serve as a practical part for the theories exposed in the former through relating some events that happened to the narrator when he was a young man. The narrator often finds difficulty in socializing and even in interacting with the different people around him. Total misunderstanding and mistrust make him feel alienated in society. His feeling of indecision keeps on haunting him until the very end of the narrative when it is revealed that he has even been hesitating to conclude his notes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781780007144
    Notes From The Underground: "To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise."
    Author

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He died in 1881 having written some of the most celebrated works in the history of literature, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov.

    Read more from Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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    Reviews for Notes From The Underground

    4/5

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    • 2/5
      Seems to be pretty standard for Fyodor's protagonists to confuse agonizing and obsessing over things with being intelligent and cultured.
    • 3/5
      This rating is provisional - I'm going to need some time for this novel to stew before coming to a final decision. I read this as part of a challenge to read cult classics which seemed a good opportunity to read a famous Russian author whose work I have been avoiding since attempting Crime and Punishment as a teenager.

      If you, like myself, are coming to this book knowing little about it, a word of advice - don't let the first part make you quit! I disliked it and found it boringly pretentious; at this point I was sure I was going to hate the book and was tempted to stop. The second part I found much more interesting; although the neurotic narrator was just as pretentious, the overall style was more accessible.
    • 5/5
      “Notes from Underground” personifies the problems of urban man, an alienated creature who has become “fond of suffering, to the point of passion, in fact”. His estrangement leaves him divorced from the modern world, a world which he loathes and yet paradoxically envies. As his “underground” condition replaces occupations with preoccupations, he becomes the acute spectator of his absent life, tormented by questions, and maddened by the diseases of excessive consciousness and morbid self-awareness.In his numerous emotional vollies, no one and nothing is sacred; his acquantainces, his whore, even his reader are attacked by this utterly detestable protoganist, if one can call him that. This anti-hero is not a figment of Dostoesvky’s poetic imagination or penmanship, but rather an exaggeration of us furtively despondent readers. From this subterranean reality, our nameless anti-hero writes. “Let me out, kind people, to have another try at living in the world!...”
    • 1/5
      I just couldn't get into it. It wasn't what I expected and it is far too philosophical for my tastes.
    • 1/5
      I have virtually no idea why this book is considered a classic. More of a "personal manifesto" than an actual story, this is a disjointed reasoning of why the narrator feels and acts so outlandishly. Though I can sympathize with some of his emotions on my very worst days, 'Notes' as a whole left me feeling exhausted and a little dull. The second part of the book does try to assume some semblance of a story, yet the other characters are hardly developed, the plot is weak, and the climax is wholly anticlimactic. The only saving grace is the scene with the prostitute, yet even that promise is not only not fulfilled, it is swept with disgust under the carpet.

    Book preview

    Notes From The Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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