Digging deep into Dostoevsky's existential classic

Allow me to be an intellectual elitist for a moment and declare that there are certain books that educated people should read before proclaiming themselves intellectuals.

Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" is one such book. You may retort, "Alright then, have you read, say, Macchiavelli's Prince?" And my answer will be 'no' — I have no aspirations to pass as an intellectual. Besides I am a busy person . . . aren't you?

However, if you can read one book in the coming weeks, make it Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground," especially if you are considering what to do after you leave Princeton. Here is why: it will make you rethink why you are here; why you do all the reading that you do (if you do it); why you do your problem sets, go to class; whether you want to succeed conventionally, as many do.

Maybe it will even give you inspiration to do your own thing instead of moving with the herd and ultimately ending up with a meaningless job (but oh, with what great compensation!).

Well, maybe it will not inspire you to do all these things. After all, it is too much to expect one little book to change what we have been primed to do — to succeed. But perhaps it will leave some residue, and who knows when that residue will resurface?

"Notes from Underground" contains the confessions of an oddball — unpopular at every stage of his life, self-deprecating but in a quite hilarious way.

What is most interesting about him is that he refuses to work and therefore consciously downgrades his quality of life. He does so because the freedom to do what pleases him — or what does not sacrifice his person — is more precious to him than his economic wellbeing.

The underground man even taunts the redeeming quality of work, saying, "Finally: I am bored, and I constantly do nothing. And writing things down really seems like work. They say work makes a man good and honest. Well, here is a chance at least." The underground man manipulates and taunts the shallow values of his industrialized and urbanized society.

Admittedly, this is a work of fiction. Would any real person not want to work? Few among us can imagine spending an entire summer idling. It is all right if you have money and decide not to work; then you are an eccentric. If you have no money and decide not to work, you are really putting yourself in a tough spot.

A rational society often rids itself of such irrational men by putting them in asylums. And our society takes every precaution to curtail the number of such oddballs by giving them some quality education — or subjecting them to "penal servitude," in the words of the underground man.

Why is it that education kills the innovative spirit in us? Why do we fear being original? The underground man is quite justified in vilifying education as "penal servitude." Anyone who responds adequately to school's demands gathers the fruits of his or her efforts upon leaving.

Those of us that stick with academics learn that the true values in life are invariably materialistic; we learn to "get around everything, to yield to everything, to be politic with everyone; never to lose sight of the useful, practical goal (some nice little government apartment, a little pension, a little decoration or two)."

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

In fact, we deliberately turn ourselves into quite bor-ing people. But for those who can plan thirty years ahead, this may be quite a feat.

And here is the catch — all along the way, we succeed in measuring up to and even surpassing the Russian romantic who totes "the beautiful and the lofty" as an ideal but only upholds it when the soul needs a little poetry to thrive on in the midst of life's squalor.

The same thing is true of our generation. While we make sure that our society progresses at a good pace by doing our share of the work, we are not the Children of the Revolution — a far cry from it.

Dostoevsky allegedly wrote his "Notes from Underground" as a response to some propa-gandist, worthless piece of liter-ature, "What is to be Done?"

In the novel, Dostoevsky gives this question a brilliantly funny answer: "But what is to be done if the sole and ex-press purpose of every intelligent man is babble — that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void?"

The answer is clear; nothing is to be done. Or at least if something is to be done to remedy the situation, it is definitely not the prized work that earns one all the glory in the world, for it comes at the expense of one's soul.