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Imagine 19th century Russian literature as a loud boisterous party. Here's Pushkin, basking in the center of attention, charming up all the ladies. Here are Chekhov and Gogol at the heart of a passionate intellectual argument. Here's Count Tolstoy, busily serving canapés while rejoicing in the pleasure of work, stopping only to chat about the pleasures of countryside with Turgenev.

But where's Dostoyevsky? Oh, there he is, sitting by himself in a dark corner, dead broke after a high-stakes cards game, giving you the unsettling intense heavy glare that easily penetrates right into the darkest best-guarded secrets of your soul, the glare that clearly says 'been there, done that, been repulsed by what I saw.' And if he looks like he's judging you, it's because he is. And you deserve it, probably.

Fyodor Mikhailovich, you don't make liking you easy, do you?


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This book is brilliant. Unpleasant and hard to read, disturbing and unsettling, and really brilliant. But before I go into my long-winded discussion, let me get this off my chest, for the honesty purposes and full disclosure:

I finally can admit - I don't "get" Dostoyevsky. Perhaps my mind is a tad too shallow for his literary depths; perhaps my inner ball of sunshine deep deep inside refuses to see the world through Dostoyevsky's disillusioned glare.

But I don't need to "get" him to know the greatness when I see it, to respect his sharp writing, his keenly observant eye that does not let anything slip away, and his scarily clear perceptions of people and the layers in which they dress up their otherwise petty and pathetic selves.

In this short and strange book, Dostoyevsky manages to create perhaps the most disturbing image of a human being in the entire 19th century literature. Let me jot down just a few of the epithets that came pouring into my head with every page I read: petty, bitter, miserly, resentful, selfish, pitiful, entitled, cruel, deeply unpleasant and frankly miserable. The person who finds disgusting satisfaction in little acts of petty nastiness. The person who perversely enjoys stewing in self-imposed misery and figurative self-flagellation over every perceived slight, building exquisite mountains out of molehills. The person who would thrive on humiliating others, but if unable to achieve that would just as happily thrive on self-humiliation and self-loathing. The person who in the confines of his little mind hides a true despot, but gets his sense of self-worth by assuming that everyone else is beneath his miserable but clearly enlightened and misunderstood self - despite the world pointing to the contrary. The person who'd quietly spit into your bowl if you haven't offered to share it with him - and then will internally torment himself for years over the act, feeling that the act of torment is enough to elevate him out of the mud.
The person who, in ramblings about how rotten society is helps it rot a little bit more.

In short, he created a character the sheer mention of whom makes me want to take a shower and wash all of the above off me.

He created a character that with all of the above scarily reminds you of so many people you know - and maybe sometimes even yourself.

And that's what really disturbing about it.



And this disturbing part is exactly what makes me from time to time abandon the fun bits of the Russian literature party and instead join Fyodor Mikhailovich in his dark gloomy corner for a minute or so. Because he makes me, unpleasant as it is, take a long critical look at myself, so that I can try to keep myself out of this "underground". Because he "gets" to me even if I don't quite "get" him.

Because it's not a story, it's a mirror, and you have to work hard to make it not be so.

I don't know how to rate this book. I did not enjoy it (how can you?) but it made a sizeable imprint on my soul. Stars are irrelevant here, so I'll randomly pick something. 4?

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Written in Munich airport, stuck on an unscheduled 20hr layover, with almost no sleep and beginnings of jet lag.