Notes from the Underground

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky / Narrated By: Simon Vance

Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins

How can something be so heartrending yet so hilarious yet so exasperating yet so yet so yet so?!

I’ll admit it.

I was one of those college students who sat alone in class, sporting Mohawk and disillusionment as so many badges of honor. As such, I was compleeeetely taken with Notes from the Underground and saw nothing but a gloomy black and white vision of my Reality. The Underground Man? I was THERE! We were, like, twins.

So to come back to it over 30 years later with my current Reality (Not to mention m’ danged hair!) so much different? HiLARious!

Okay, let’s start with the beginning wherein The Underground Man basically is on a rant to whomever will read his words. And oooooh how MANY words. This is a short work, but boy! does that first bit go on, or what?! I’d just gotten my first Covid vaccine and was drifting in and out of a very bushed doze, and I kept feeling like, as I listened to him rave, I was listening to my husband when he comes home from work and tells me how his day was. I full-well felt my eyes glaze over. After all, The Underground Man (Whom Dostoevsky never names) is just so tickled with himself, hating anyone and everything. It goes on forEVER.

But then Dostoevsky takes onto the next part where it’s story and not just words. We feel the man’s helplessness as he rages over slights from yeeeeeears ago, as he tells us of how he tried, just tried soooo hard, to get back at an officer, to NOT step aside, to act as tho’ he had a right to be walking along also. It takes him having to shut his eyes to just bump into the officer only to find? It’s almost as tho’ he wasn’t even there, the officer having not noticed him at all. Here, as a woman in her 50s trying to feel okay about taking up space in the world, after spending decades stepping aside to let others pass, I FELT him. And it was painful.

Yet so hilarious. How could that be?

And then The Underground Man absolutely throws himself into a party of school not-such-chums and finds himself slighted and belittled, as he’d guessed he would be. He yearns to say such superior things, to put the men in their place, but he fails and rages instead. And then he spends hours pacing and sweating and raging. Only to follow the group to a secret brothel where he passes out. Only to wake up next to a prostitute. He rages, tells her she will die a most pitiable death, sketches out her dire future, enough to shake the poor girl to tears.

Only to berate himself and offer her words of comfort, some shining hope.

Only to wish he hadn’t done so and to make choices based on his complete and utter faith in himself as a despicable human being. -But- he posits: Are we not all so despicable? Given a Utopia, wouldn’t we just muck it all up for ourselves, just by being ourselves?

All this is narrated sooo capably by the venerable Simon Vance. He sneers as the man waxes on and on about his superiority, or he seethes and rages as the man comes undone MANY times. Every now and again, the man is brought to his knees, and Vance had me almost in tears, it was so heartrending. When the prostitute, Liza, shows up at the end, and when she responds to his utter tormenting of her by dissolving into his own torment? Dude, I did NOT remember it to be THAT touching when I was in college. I’m sure I eschewed all signs of the vulnerability shown within the text, and hats off to Mr. Vance for such a performance!

NATURALLY I hit Wikipedia whenst done to get more info, and I was deLIGHTed to find that “Underground” comes from a baaaaad translation. The Russian word translates more closely into “crawl space” and isn’t that wonderful?! Visions of John Wayne Gacy and the horrors HE left in his crawl space flashed in my mind; it made me thinks of the crooks, the crannies, the utter darkness in my own head.

Yup, Mr. Dostoevsky, sir.

Given a Utopia? We’d make a muck of it, most CERtainly…!

Of all the versions of Notes from the Underground out there, I doooo suggest this version. Simon Vance? He rocks!