![]() ![]() To Dostoevsky, such tormented wretches as his underground man, who finger their wounds until their thoughts grow sick and dangerous, are the inevitable consequence of a liberalised society that rejects tradition and religion, promising unlimited glory to the individual only to subject him to humiliating material conditions. Notes From Underground pulled back the rock to uncover a festering sublayer of society whose existence literature had hitherto failed to acknowledge. ![]() Rereading it now, I see myself as I was at 20: odious, tortured, consumed by rage, obsessing over perceived slights, compelled to act in incomprehensible ways while veering between feelings of worthlessness and a monstrous arrogance. As such, it is a vessel for painful self-knowledge. ![]() The novel is a scream of human perversity, and the most unflinching study of self-loathing in the literary canon. Dostoevsky's abject, cringing narrator, cowering in a basement hovel in St Petersburg, insists that humankind would rather tear itself apart than submit to boredom or obligatory happiness. Is it preposterous to suggest that Fyodor Dostoevsky prophesied the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and the seething hate-pits of social media? Notes From Underground is a vicious slap in the face to the delusion that man is a rational being who acts in his own self-interests. ![]()
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