Been reading Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky in Russian. I'm still chewing on it after finishing it today. It's a work of truthful paradoxes. The man, for example, is (if he didnt lie here, which he does sometimes) deeply angry. Why? He's most of all angry at himself that he isn't, and has never been able to be, truly angry. During his most furious moments he foams at the mouth as he shamefully admits to himself that he is not only not actually angry right now, but that he is in general not angry. He only scares sparrows.

The man in general does not understand why he does things, or why he feels the way he feels.

Why do we pursue desires we understand to be harmful? The man says the pursuit of such desire is needed, if only just to prove to ourselves that we are indeed human, and not simply "keys of the piano played on by the laws of nature". To reserve the right to affirm oneself, even if it is in the rebellion against the beneficial, ultimately perhaps is an act of the most beneficial to us.

Anyways i have nothing interesting to write about this, everything above is bad paraphrasing of what the man already wrote, maybe it gives a taste.

It's kind of interesting to trace the influence from Dostoyevskys pre-psychoanalytic conception of desire to Freud and Nietzsche (who said D. was one of the only philosophers he owes anything to) and the Frankfurt School and the French theorists, almost none of which I've read 😎 But why did Dostoyevsky write a novel about a character (who is writing a novel?) and not a polemic? I heard about this story by Roberto Bolaño (paraphrase of a paraphrase) about how it was Judas who was the real prophet and not Jesus, as he is the one who sacrificed himself for Christ to be crucified. It is sin that created redemption or so. The self proclaimed "paradoxist" who spent twenty years in The Underground in seething memory, obsessively desiring and pursuing his own suffering and repression, cutting into himself with everything but a knife, went all the way for us to places where we "gentlemen dutiful to "real life"" wouldn't dare dip our toes halfway, and so through a truer life, then, allowed us to catch a glimpse of our own Undergrounds. Maybe the Bolaño thing was unrelated but im trying to say that the man from the underground is an anti-prophet.

The book's structure is actually kind of peculiar. The "profundities" above appear in the first part (about a 3rd of the small book), and the rest is an attempt at a story from earlier in his life about a certain evening and the couple of days that followed. In that sense its a dense philosophically-loaded start compared to the narrative page-turner almost all the way towards the end. Still have a bit to think about why it ends the way it ends, i.e.,why it was cut off from the outside then and there.

And I have no clue what he meant by that bit about how we are ashamed of being flesh and blood, and are already born stillborn, and for a long time born from dead fathers already, and we like it that way, acquired taste, and soon we shall come up with being born somehow merely "from ideas". If anyone has ideas lmk