Book review: Notes from Underground, by Roger Scruton
The late great Sir Roger Scruton’s Notes from Underground, named after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, is a beautifully written short novel set around 1985 mostly in Prague, Czechoslovakia six years before the fall of the iron curtain. Scruton had first-hand knowledge of Prague and its underground networks during this time as he actively supported them.
From Wikipedia:
From 1979 to 1989, Scruton was an active supporter of dissidents in Czechoslovakia under Communist Party rule, forging links between the country’s dissident academics and their counterparts in Western universities. As part of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, he and other academics visited Prague and Brno (now in the Czech Republic) in support of an underground education network started by the Czech dissident Julius Tomin, smuggling in books, organizing lectures, and eventually arranging for students to study for a Cambridge external degree in theology (the only faculty that responded to the request for help). There were structured courses and samizdat translations, books were printed, and people sat exams in a cellar with papers smuggled out through the diplomatic bag.
The novel is narrated by the main character, Jan Reichl, from the position of his disappointing future life, safe and at liberty in America. Jan looks back on the days of Soudruh Androš (Comrade Underground), (his Pen-Name during the time he was an Author) when, along with his mother, he distributed samizdat literature in Prague and lived a life underground in fear of the StB (the state security police) and everyone around him.
Jan rides the underground metro, subtly people-watching and writes about the lives he has imagined for the expressionless passengers in his book “Rumours”. The book, as well as his own stupidity, gets his mother arrested, causes a beautiful, secretive and intellectually superior woman to fall in love with him against her better judgement, and eventually grants him his present position teaching at an American college.
Jan exists in his ‘underground’, the state of mind that imposes solitude, fear, anxiety and deceit upon itself. Jan, like almost everyone else in Prague, barely acknowledges other people. Anyone who isn’t someone you’re supposed to be talking to, such as your boss or your family, is best ignored in case of looking suspicious. The result is a self-centredness and a self-isolation that creeps into even your close relationships. You find out in the novel there is much Jan does not know about his mother, despite them living together.
Betka, Jan’s lover and guide throughout the novel, drags him out of the ‘underground’ in his mind and up into the light to search for and attempt to confront the truth. Ironically, this new world he enters is the politically dissident underground, filled with samizdat networks, unofficial priests and underground lecture rooms. Betka, however, seems to exist with just a foot in this new world and a foot outside of it, creating a deliberate and seemingly self-serving distance from Jan. The mystery of her plays constantly on his anxious and suspicious mind, not yet completely rid of its underground shackles.
Jan and Betka’s story is an exploration of meaning. Jan who was miserable in the beginning, in a state of oppression and scarcity, is almost as miserable at the end in the land of liberty and plenty. He looks back on the time in between, with Betka, as the most meaningful part of his life. It was in this period that he learned, loved, pledged vows before God and rediscovered the forbidden arts of Czech’s past cultural influencers, their great artists, writers and composers.
I noticed five core ideas that I think are explored as sources of meaning in the book: Truth, home, love, suffering and Christ.
Truth
Truth in the book is expressed as a way of life more than objective fact. Betka causes Jan to realise his underground life is a lie; a lie lived for the completely selfish purpose of self-preservation. It takes the whole book for Jan to stop lying to himself and other people, and this selfishness causes him to miss noticing important things about other people, specifically Betka.
Home
Scruton vividly illustrates the importance of language, culture, community and local knowledge. These are things that create an idea of home and things that are suppressed in the communist regime. The Czech language is used throughout the book to highlight its importance. The atmosphere in the underground lectures is described as the solidarity of the shattered; people who are broken from their past cultural heritage and trying to regain it together. The leader of this group, Rudolf, finds it impossible to reconcile his vision of the post-soviet he is fighting for, to what it becomes; he spent his life trying to revive traditional Czech literature against the communist machine only to watch the Western capitalist popular culture machine contaminate the country once it gains freedom. This leaves him bitter and resentful. Bekta takes Jan to her home, they enjoy the local wildlife and flora together and Bekta teaches him the names of the plants and insects. For me this drew parallels to Adam naming God’s creations in the garden, as well as the importance of names being a literary theme in many other books. How can we be considered stewards of the land if we do not even care to know the wildlife and plants by their names? All of this builds a picture of what it means to ‘be’ at home.
Love
When it comes to love, there are four main relationships in the book that show many kinds of love, and Scruton also describes many negative, unloving relationships in contrast to them. It is far too broad a subject to list out the important details of the different relationships, but the contrast in the novel is clear as far as Jan is concerned. He spent the book building these loving relationships and from our unhappy narrator’s present place in America, he has none of them.
Suffering
Much is said in the book about suffering and Christianity. Suffering is a fundamental truth of human existence and, just as Christ embodies all truth, He shows us the truth of suffering. The passage below is taken from the book:
I spontaneously resonated to Father Pavel’s message. He described the supernatural as an everyday presence, folded into the scheme of things like the lining of a coat. The Christian religion, he said, is not refuted by suffering, but uses suffering to make sense of the world. And he added a thought that surprised me, not because it was at odds with what I knew, but because it fitted my experience so exactly. God, he said, could be present among us only if He first divests himself of power. To enter this world dressed in the power that created it would be to threaten us all with destruction. Hence God enters in secret. He is the truly powerless one, whose role is to suffer and forgive. That is the meaning of the sacrifice, in which the body and blood of the Redeemer are shared among his killers. Those thoughts astonished me, not because they led me to adopt Father Pavel’s faith, but because they wrapped all that had happened to me — Dad, Mother, my life underground, and Betka too — in a single idea, the very idea that Mother had chosen as the name of her press. And it is this that I appreciated most in Father Pavel — that his religion was not an escape from suffering but a way of accepting it. The supermarket heavens of my new neighbours, which draw a veil over suffering and therefore make no sense of it or of anything else, take me back to those beautiful, terrible days, when our dear city turned in its sleep and its dreams were dreams of a crucified God. As we left the little church, I asked Father Pavel whether he had suffered much in prison. “Oh no,” he said, “those were happy times. When you lose your worldly power you gain power of another kind. Those who have only worldly power are truly the powerless ones.” I shrugged my shoulders at this but, as we walked away from the church towards the Main Station, where he had a train to catch, Father Pavel spoke about his time in prison. His conversation moved quietly and with great calm strides above the mountaintops, touching on faith, sacrifice, and freedom, never mentioning those great things by name, but simply lifting my eyes to them, as they are lifted by the dawn. In prison he had lived among common criminals; but he had also found himself working side by side with a few of our nation’s best, people who had been placed there for their virtues and not for their sins. It had been a university of the heart, and around him were people who had been seeking what he had found, and who had the knowledge and will to convey it. I came away from this conversation in a state of astonishment, and each evening thereafter I would read in Mother’s Bible, trying to reconstruct the person who had written in its margins.
This is one of my favourite extracts from the book. Scruton has explained this point on suffering better than I ever could. It clearly states that without suffering, we have no sense of anything, making everything meaningless and I think that’s true. Even pop culture has made this observation in films like The Matrix. Humans cannot exist in any meaningful way without suffering.
Christ
It is difficult to detach the conversation about Christ from the conversation about suffering but, interestingly, Jan accepts one and not the other. Throughout the book, Scruton shows a deep knowledge of Christianity through Father Pavel and makes very strong arguments to Jan. Jan is not converted and it seems as though Christianity via Father Pavel is presented as a parallel path to the one Jan opts to take instead. He is unable to believe that Christianity is not based on fiction, even as he’s confessing himself to Father Pavel in church.
The Novel is a deep investigation into meaning and its source. It is very critical of Western liberal capitalism and its doctrine of human rights, as well as the Utopian Materialist ideals of the soviet communists. It also has criticisms for Christianity, although those are subtle. We see in the novel that Betka actively steers Jan towards her way, and warns about giving Father Pavel too much power over him. The argument I took from the book is that to live a meaningful life, we must not allow the outside world to make us fearful, selfish or cruel. All of these things are choices, whether they look that way or not, and Betka showed Jan there was a way up from the underground. Then we must figure out where we are, where we came from and where we are going. We must take the hardships as part of the journey, whether those are hardships forced on us from an oppressive state, or hardships of circumstance, it doesn’t matter, as without the suffering, the whole journey is meaningless. Freedom is as much a curse as oppression without an active effort of self-discovery, and when you have lost purpose the selfishness, isolation and self-doubt creeps back in and you have to start all over again. It is interesting that the one person we do not see at the end of the book is Father Pavel. Everyone else except Betka is miserable and/or aimless, and Jan imagines he sees Father Pavel in a similar state, but it turns out not to be him…
and that this last image from a vanished world was just another fiction, born of my need.
Perhaps this suggests that he needed to believe Father Pavel was as lost as him now the struggle was over. But for us, Christ gives us a lifelong purpose and we will always have more to give to him. This will shield us from the disappointment of ultimate success and the realisation that comes with it; that now either all that is left is suffering, or if our work has alleviated the threat of any real suffering, all that is left is meaninglessness.
Will Younger
Next Meeting:
