Dostoevsky’s anger

In an essay on Notes from Underground , the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk suggests that Dostoevsky’s “anger was not a simply expression of anti-Westernism or hostility to European thinking: What Dostoyevsky[his spelling] resented was that European thought came to his country at second hand. What angered him was not its brilliance, its originality, or its utopian leanings but the facile pleasure it afforded those who embraced it. He hated seeing Russian intellectuals seize upon an idea just arrived from Europe and believe themselves privy to all the secrets of the world and – more important – of their own country. He could not bear the happiness this grand illusion gave them. Dostoyevsky’s quarrel was not with the Russian youths who read Chernishevsky and drew upon this Russian writer to elaborate a crude, juvenile, secondhand ‘deterministic dialectic,’ what bothered him was the way this new European philosophy was celebrated with such an aura of early success.” The book is about “the jealousy, anger, and pride of a man who cannot make himself into a European.”