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Rating: How difficult it is to live. Being conscious of oneself, becoming aware of the misery of the human condition. We are merely small mean beings. We are nothing but anguished individuals, psychologically annihilated by the harsh and bare reality that every day unmasks our certainties and leads us to reflect on the reasons for our social condition. Man is an insignificant creature, lost in an infinite and whirling vortex of sensations stemming from the soul and its twisted mind.
It arrives. The crisis.
A narrating self, destructively mental, mentally destroyed. A suffering, abject man. Consciously suffering. "Suffering, this is the only cause of awareness". A sick man, small, hidden in the darkest corner of the darkest room in the world. Ashamed of himself, inept, self-deceiving.
A murky monologue on the moral degradation of society and of man in general, a timid living creature resting on illusions. Science cannot improve humanity, reason does not completely control our intellect, but it is limited. We act beyond our intentions, we transcend the categories of utility to surrender to the superfluous, to the destruction of the concept of common sense. Man in his entirety is evil, he enjoys seeing others suffer, suffers seeing others enjoy.
The work, a delirious succession of spiteful theories towards the world, is divided into two parts. The first is a desecrating interior monologue. Words of disease and anger, of hatred and putrefaction towards moral corruption and the actions of men. In the second part, Dostoevsky tells us about the overwhelming mental repercussions of events seemingly of little account. Delirium crises, weeping, moral insults to a woman, futile attempts to "be someone" through action.
But the most astonishing aspect of this work is the propensity to probe the unconscious. The Russian writer anticipates what Freud will later adopt and base his psychoanalysis on. The unconscious can be "penetrated," and Dostoevsky does it with "philosophical ruthlessness." Before the Russian, the psyche was identified with reason, but he was the first to lay the foundations for deciphering the human unconscious, through the systematic deconstruction of the soul.
A work in which the ineptitude of the early twentieth century and the "mal du vivre" of romanticism merge.
Man is sick, he is prey to his disease.
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