NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Year: 2021 (1864)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish (translator Cecilia Borelius-Rohnström)

Some people choose to be unhappy. Not because they are doomed by fate or overwhelmed by circumstance, but because they cannot bear the vulnerability that joy and connection require. For these people, happiness feels like weakness, and love like exposure. The only emotion they feel safe expressing is resentment and their most reliable source of comfort is to distribute that unhappiness outward, like a contagion.

In “Anteckningar från ett källarhål” (“Notes from the Underground”), Fyodor Dostoevsky gives voice to one such man. The Underground Man, bitter, and obsessively self-conscious, lives in voluntary isolation, sharpening his cynicism and building elaborate justifications for his own misery. He is a man who has turned away from the world not because the world has rejected him, but because connection demands surrender, and surrender is unbearable.

He is not simply a man without love. He is a man who cannot tolerate being loved.

While the novel is often read as a philosophical precursor to existentialism, indeed Jean-Paul Sartre cited it as an influence, what makes Dostoevsky’s short but dense work so powerful is its psychological clarity. The Underground Man is not merely a symbol or a theoretical construct; he is a living case study in emotional dysfunction. His life is defined by a profound inability, and ultimately an outright refusal, to love or be loved.

This is not because love is unavailable to him, but because love requires vulnerability, surrender, and an openness to grace, all things he equates with humiliation. What emerges from “Anteckningar från ett källarhål” is a portrait of a deeply damaged personality: a man whose need for control and pride is so consuming that it obliterates his capacity for intimacy. The ultimate incel, if you wish.

“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness,”* the Underground Man proclaims early in the novel. This diagnosis of himself is remarkably prescient. The character’s hyperconsciousness, his habit of analysing every motive, overthinking every emotion, and anticipating every possible humiliation, aligns closely with what Søren Kierkegaard would call "the sickness unto death": the despair that comes from being alienated from oneself. In Kierkegaard’s view, despair is not simply suffering, but a state of active self-estrangement, in which the self refuses to be what it truly is. For the Underground Man, selfhood is not a project to be realised, it is a battlefield on which he endlessly defeats himself.

In modern psychological terms, we might recognise this as a narcissistic defence mechanism in which vulnerability is so intolerable that it must be replaced by control. His encounters with others are not opportunities for connection but arenas for psychological warfare. His interactions with former schoolmates are marked by bitterness and a fixation on perceived slights.

Most tragic, however, is his encounter with Liza, a young prostitute who offers him the possibility of tenderness. When she responds to his philosophical speech on degradation with something like empathy, he becomes unhinged. What could have been a moment of shared humanity, becomes an existential threat. Liza threatens to see him, to treat him not as a freak or a failure but as a person. He cannot allow it. He responds by humiliating her, handing her money in a moment that reads like a deliberate reenactment of her life-trauma.

“But this I can say for certain: though I did that cruel thing purposely, it was not an impulse from the heart, but came from my evil brain.”*

What makes this so poignant is that he knows exactly what he is doing. This tension between insight and paralysis lies at the heart of Dostoevsky’s genius. The Underground Man is not delusional. He is painfully self-aware. But rather than using that awareness to change, he uses it as a weapon against both himself and others. His failure to act, to connect, to seek forgiveness is filtered through a philosophical defence of inaction. People with deeply entrenched cognitive distortions will often reject positive experiences because they contradict the internal narratives they have built. Such experiences threaten to shatter the very cornerstone of their identity as outcasts and victims. The Underground Man cannot accept Liza’s compassion because it violates the only truth he believes defines him: that he is fundamentally unlovable.

What makes Dostoevsky’s portrayal so unsettling is that this refusal of love is not presented as a personal flaw to be overcome. It is presented as a choice. The Underground Man chooses his isolation and nurses his misery. He would rather suffer on his own terms than risk happiness on someone else’s. This is not the story of a man who could not find love. It is the story of a man who saw love coming and slammed the door shut. In doing so, he ensured that he would never be humiliated. But also, that he would never be saved.

* English quotes are from the Judith Boss translation at Project Gutenberg.

WINTER IS COMING

Author: Garry Kasparov
Year: 2015
Publisher: Public Affairs
Language: English

In 2010, in the aftermath of the global credit crunch triggered by the American sub-prime crisis and the sudden failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers Inc, the Greek economy had come under particular pressure. Standing at the brink of national bankruptcy that would risk hurling the entire world into a second calamity, the EU launched an aid programme leading to a conservative disbursement of merely 52 billion euros. At that time, I was following the events in Greece in my professional capacity and my verdict was “Not nearly enough. This will hurt more than help.”

In 2014, the makeshift barricades of tyres and sandbags on the Independence Square in central Kyiv were still aflame when the Russian government annexed Crimea and covertly moved troops into Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine responded with whatever military force they were able to muster whereas the Free World chose to impose modest and largely inconsequential sanctions on selected individuals and companies. Again, as a professional observer of the unfolding conflict where people were losing their lives and their freedom, my verdict was “What would happen, if Barack Obama, at the invitation of Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, would deploy 50,000 troops to Donbas? I bet not a single shot would be fired, and no one would have to die.”

In the case of Greece, the aid package was interpreted by the market as the ultimate limit of the EU’s willingness to stand by Greece, and speculation against Greek national debt exploded. In the end, the EU had to bail Greece out with a total of 330 billion worth of support programmes.

In the case of Ukraine, faced with such lukewarm and hesitant resistance, Vladimir Putin was emboldened to eight years later launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine leading to the death of close to a million Russian soldiers to this date, and heaven knows how many Ukrainian troops and civilians.

My point is that skimpiness today, may multiply the costs by tomorrow.  

In that light, Garry Kasparov’s “Winter Is Coming”, first published in 2015, i.e. just about the time I was bemoaning the vacuum of decisiveness in the face of danger, reads as a vindication.

Kasparov, the chess grandmaster-turned-oppositionist, has spent the better part of two decades shouting into the wind. The book is an unflinching indictment of Western complacency, tracing a direct line from the Second Chechen War (see review of “A Small Corner of Hell” from September 2023) and the suppression of independent media to Crimea, Donbas, and beyond. His language is unsparing, his targets broad: Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, George W. Bush—each is rebuked for misreading or enabling the Kremlin. Kasparov is particularly dismissive of the recurring Western delusion that Putin is a pragmatic leader who merely seeks respect and security.

What distinguishes Kasparov’s analysis is less the originality of the insight than the moral urgency with which it is delivered. While many commentators held out hope that Putin’s authoritarianism might be tempered by economic integration or generational change, Kasparov saw a different pattern, one disturbingly familiar to those who study autocracies: consolidation, repression, expansion. His instincts have proved more accurate than many of the softly hedged assessments emanating from think tanks and chancelleries.

This provokes a haunting suspicion. If Kasparov understood … if even I understood … How could Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Herman van Rompuy not understand? The only conceivable answer is that they did. They simply failed to act.

One thing that Garry Kasparov, in all his unquestionable lucidity, did not foresee is the ongoing demolition of liberal freedoms and democratic institutions in the Free World. He did not predict that the US would turn on its allies and join the ranks of autocratic and oppressive regimes and he did not predict that Europe, instead of exporting its liberal values to Hungary, Serbia, Belarus, and Poland, would instead import their penchant for racism, populism, and nationalism.   

Kasparov writes not as an academic or a diplomat, but as a participant in Russia’s political unraveling. His reflections on the missed opportunities of the Yeltsin years, the rise of the siloviki, and the Kremlin’s mastery of manufactured consent offer more than polemic. There is real analysis here, shaped by direct confrontation with the machinery of the Russian state. That lived experience, alongside his fluency in the West’s ideological blind spots, gives the book a unique and, in hindsight, tortured and furious voice.

What once seemed like Cassandra-like fury now reads, unsettlingly, as reportage from the near future. With Ukraine engulfed in war, and Western democracies scrambling to reset their posture toward Moscow, Kasparov’s book has acquired the gravity of foresight fulfilled. Few will finish “Winter Is Coming” without conceding that the grandmaster saw several moves ahead. The time is come to pay the full price of what could have been managed at a bargain ten years ago. It is far from certain, that the West will prove solvent.