Letters from the Depths of the Earth (Notes from Underground)

The novel Notes from Underground, by Dostoevsky. As you read this novel you ask yourself what made you take on this cockroach of a man, in his dark and foul interior. It is divided into two parts: “Underground”, in which the wretched hero talks about himself and we get to know this character who loves no one and perhaps hates everyone, whose task is to disturb the peace of all those around him; and the second part, “Apropos of the Wet Snow”, in which this hero talks about some adventures he lived through and recounts the details of events that passed in his life. The novel clearly tends toward expressing existential philosophy and some consider it the first existentialist novel, for the human person, with all his flaws, is the foundation and origin in the novel’s treatment, and as we read it we almost feel that we are sitting behind the hero’s eyes watching events, with the added point that what moves us in that place are the hero’s thoughts and conceptions of the characters around him, which he himself drew and which may be otherwise. The man is extremely pessimistic. The blackness and dark fog in the scenes reminded me of Kafka’s books; it is frightening, as though you are in a real, wretched and dark cellar, trying to finish quickly and get out of the book, not because of any suspense it contains, since it contains none, but because of the suffocation you feel from the author’s pessimism about this world. Before reading, take a compass, and read about Dostoevsky’s thought before opening one of his books… and then read slowly. “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man… I am an unattractive man.” Yes, Dostoevsky is a great writer who excels at diving into the recesses of the human soul with a tendency to highlight its negative and wretched aspects, but this novel is gloomy to an unnatural degree; there are few events, the inner monologue is very long and repetitive, and even in the one beautiful relationship he overlooked the positive aspects and turned it, with his excessive obsessiveness and exaggeration, into a bad, dirty relationship with an evil inclination.