Reading Notes: Notes from the Underground

While reading through this phenomenal work by Dostoyevsky for the very first time, I'm amazed by the similarity to other (later, contemporary, and much later) works I've read. First and foremost is the similarity to the narrator's voice in Henry Miller's Tropics books -- and even Black Spring. Where once I thought Miller fresh, bold, hysterical and profound -- many things, but mostly original -- I now see that while he was one hell of a writer, he was not as original as I first thought. It's sort of like when I first noticed the similarity between Cubism and the art of the Ancient Egyptians -- where objects seen from different perspectives are depicted on the same plane. Where, before having learned of this similarity, I thought Picasso brilliant -- impossibly original -- I now think of him as a gifted genius but not as original as I first thought.


There is in Dostoyevsky's NftU a quality that seems so far ahead of its time that it gives me the chills at times. For instance, the section in Part 2 -- A Propos of the Wet Snow, Chapter 1, where he describes that long, ridiculous one-sided feud with the unnamed officer he works so hard to challenge at the Nevsky -- the same officer he feels he could have educated, improved, had the officer but given him the respect he deserved! This is Humbert Humbert speaking here! Who could fail to recognize Humbert in those lines -- also the echo of Charles Kinbote from Pale Fire!

Maybe the impression that his work is so far ahead of its time is created by the sheer fact that Dostoyevsky influenced so many of the great writers who came after him. And Dostoyevsky is not immune to such influence either. I can clearly discern the voice of some of Edgar Alan Poe's narrators in later parts of NftU. Sure enough, looking at publication and birth/death dates reveals an obvious overlap where it is possible -- though how probable I don't know -- that Dostoyevsky could have read Poe's work. This is something I suspect but not something I've had the pleasure of researching yet. I wonder if there is any literature out there on the influence Poe had on Dostoyevsky?

At any rate -- this I would include right up there with Don Quixote, War and Peace, Moby Dick, and The Old Man and the Sea, Lolita, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and those few others as one of the greatest of all novels ever written.

Funny thing about this Part 2 of the story though. If you read (as so many tend to do these days) about this book rather than read it, you'll wonder even several chapters into the second part what ever happened to the prostitute everyone comments so much about. Interesting how everyone who has a lecture on youtube or a paper published online seems to neglect the wonderful anecdotes shared in the first two or three chapters of the second part of NftU....