هذه الرواية حاولت ان ابداها مرتين تقريبا او ثلاث مرات وفي كل مرة اتركها من اول صفحتين ،ثلاثة واشعر انى لست فى مود قرائتها حاليا وقررت شرائها ورقيا وجذبنى شكل الغلاف واعجبني فقلت ربما اندمج معها أسرع وظلت فترة ايضا في مكتبتى حتي قررت مؤخرا قرائتها

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الراوية بها قسمين

القسم الاول : يقدم به كاتب المذكرات اراءه وافكاره وكان هذا القسم ثقيل على نفسى ، فلسفي ، به اجزاء احببتها واجزاء لم استوعبها لكن انطباعي حينها كان هل من المعقول ان اقييم رواية لدوستويفسكى بنجمة او اتنين ، لن يطاوعني قلبي

This book is written by the underground man, an embittered, sick and wicked man who has rejected society.
The statements made by this unnamed narrator are harsh, full of self-loathing, self-deprecation, and have no definite system or structure.

The narrator has masochistic tendencies. He pushes himself to agony.

the pleasure of despair, of course, but it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.

There are two parts in these notes. First part consists of the ruminations and observations of the narrator and second consists of some particular life experiences of his.

The writing was absolutely brilliant. Dostoevsky is a keen observer of human psychology and has a fascinating way of putting it across.

And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.

I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

There is something about the narrator, the “anti-hero” of The Underground that wildly reminds me of Don Quixote. Here is an insignificant middle-aged man, a cultivated man who mostly lives through books, a miserable man who essentially feels out of place and degraded, “insulted, crushed and ridiculed” in a cruel rat race, a lonely man who always seeks to put himself in the most awkward situations (as if to confirm his belief that the whole world is indeed plotting against him), finally a man unable to express genuine love and always resorting to self-defeating bookish clichés. I guess, by extension, the protagonist of The Underground reminds me of most ageing, embittered, gloomy men around us, men who, says Dostoevsky, “positively must exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed”. If I’m honest, he reminds me of myself.

Dostoevsky has shown us, through the figures of Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavroguin and others, how distressing it is to be a conscious human being. But this short novella is indeed a concentrate, an extremely harrowing version of his later novels. Here, the plot is reduced to a skeleton: first, a long philosophical confession whereby the narrator rambles and vents his resentment against the world, modern “civilisation” and against himself; then a short, fragmented diary relating a couple of anecdotes where he makes a fool of himself. (The encounter with Liza, the prostitute, heralds the character of Sonya in Crime and Punishment.)

I imagine that George Orwell thought not only of Zamyatin’s We, but of this Underworld Man as well when he created the character of Winston Smith and described his helpless struggle for freedom and love. Orwell’s sentence, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” sounds like a direct and ironic reply to Dostoevsky’s “twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” Dostoevsky believed that freedom, even at the price of truth and happiness, was the touchstone of humanity. Orwell thought truth was the ultimate condition of freedom, but possibly not that of happiness. Both were starkly against a political revolution that would destroy these values to attempt to establish an authoritarian utopia of happiness for the masses.

However, this novella shows a picture of man as an inherently unhappy creature, as it were ontologically “divorced from life”. What is striking is that this divorce, this deep pain is both the source and the result of civilisation, culture, literature. By the end of his compelling confession, the anti-hero gasps: “Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books... Why, we don’t even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.” Books are a shield and a screen against life. This is a simple yet striking statement, and it is indeed ironic that we need this short book, as well as Cervantes’s longer one, to reveal this to us.