Notes From the Underground

Literature is like sex. It is so much better when you excercise a little patience. I have made the same mistake so many times - marathon sessions with the same person, exhausting all possibilities before having a chance to savor things. Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Neal Stephenson, Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck, Clive Barker, Frank Herbert - all authors that I exhausted. I read one book and fell so in love with it that I cracked out and read everthing they wrote in a matter of weeks. I have tried to mature, and the two authors that I savor these days, that I anticipate and plan reading, spreading out their books like a broke junkie, are Thomas Pynchon and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read Crime and Punishment in high school, but never could appreciate it until I became literate in Christianity. After reading it again a few years ago, I have become a Dostoevsky disciple.

Notes From the Underground, which I just finished, is an important work because it is so obviously the first stab at the philosophy Dostoevsky would become so famous for in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. While those books wrap the message in such a rich tapestry of Russian history that most can enjoy the novels while being ignorant of the thrust of his philosophy, Notes From the Underground is naked in its indictment of moral relativism. FD spent 4 years in Siberia for his Socialist leanings, enduring a mock execution, and NFTU is a refutation of all the pie in the sky rantings he stood for as a young man.

It is hard to argue with the label NFTU has as the world's first existentialist novel. But you can take a literature class for that riff. What hit me was the sagacity of FD's prose, especially as a Las Vegan. FD sees the danger embodied by Nietzsche, who was so popular in Russia at the time, and Marx, whose ideas would later tear Russia apart. Morality is not relative. The novel's climax showcases Vegas life - the quote “They – they won’t let me – I – I can’t be good!” as the underground man reflects upon his liaison with a prostitute - encapsulates the experience of so many pilgrimages to Las Vegas. I understand that the embrace of amorality has become Vegas's calling card, but FD reminds how disgusting it is to let it pass with such ambivalence.