Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a sophisticated novell with extremely hard to comprehend philosophical ideas lying on the border of paranoia, orthodoxal believing of God and psychological researches on human nature. Every sentence sounds like a sort of revelation to an unprepared reader’s mind and causes a deep flashback thoughts which are impossible to get rid of, which also require an immediate solution.
Though it’s hard to define precisely what kind of content presented in novell but one can say it is a sort of impossible mixture of traditional Dostoevsky’s ideas of loneliness, ideas of internal human confilct, ideas of freedom and interhuman relationship.
Reader keeps interest to the story in all time whilst he reads it. Such an effect is achieved by author’s methodical strikes right into reader’s head, so when you read a novell you have an extremely real experience of YOU being THERE, of you experiencing all that awe of facing loneliness and society exile. All that Dostoevsky literator’s power teleports you right into that underground, right into that dirty yellow (when you read Dostoevsky’s book you realize that yellow is a color neither of sun nor of life nor whatever, but it is a color of decay, corruption and something hectic) underground of poor Saint Petersburg’s borough. And you feel like that underground trying to kill you, trying to eliminate of your individuality and make your soul look like a sort of madness, like all that dirty corners and floors of that dirty yellow room. You can feel like you became totaly crazy with that hero’s feelings and thoughts, and you even may not imagine the level of feeling of threaten you can experience… But while you read the story you should better hold at least a tiny thread to reality in order to realize that you are not in a lunatic asylum yet.
If you are not so much frightened you may be encouraged to make a trip to that world of Dostoevsky’s St. Peterburg and encounter with an entire human catastrophe by reading a book or listening to it.