From Wretchedness on Out

 Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Notes from Underground is summarized this way:

"...Dostoevsky's protagonist explores the underground of his own tormented life, a confession unmatched in literature for its raging paradoxes, its odious admissions, its frightful insights into the chaos of human consciousness."

This protagonist is disagreeing with the idea that humankind make it their object to live their lives as morally and rationally as possible, even at the best of times.  He writes:

"Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities?  Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick  He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.  It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly, that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself - as though that were so necessary  - that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar." (Notes from Underground, 50)

This is a consistent ambiguity in Dostoevsky's work: humanity's greatness and wretchedness.  What Dostoevsky does so well is to expose the wretchedness that is so often covered over.  Though the value of seeing this may be doubted, having the wretchedness exposed is an important first step toward diagnosing and overcoming it.  It is especially valuable that Dostoevsky's work on the whole serves to illuminate the redemptive arc of Christ's love, penetrating more deeply than to play on us as piano keys, but rather to work on us from our wretchedness on out.  He diagnoses it, and over the course of our life, delivers us from it.