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Notes from Underground Hardcover – March 12, 2014

by Roger Scruton (Author)

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Set in the twilight years of the Czechoslovak communist regime, recalled from the suburbs of Washington, this novel describes a doomed love affair between two young people trapped by the system. Roger Scruton evokes a world in which every word and gesture bears a double meaning, as people seek to find truth amid the lies and love in the midst of betrayal. The novel tells the story of Jan Reichl, condemned to a menial life by his father's alleged crime, and of Betka, the girl who offers him education, opportunity and love, but who mysteriously refuses to commit herself.

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Bronze Winner of a 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Suspense/Thriller category — Independent Publisher Book Awards

About the Author

Roger Scruton is a freelance writer and philosopher, who rescued himself from the academy twenty years ago. He currently lives in rural Wiltshire, England. He has held posts in the American Enterprise Institute, and in the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is married with two children. He is the author of 40 books, including five works of fiction, and composed two operas. He is widely known on both sides of the Atlantic as a public intellectual with a broadly conservative vision. His acclaimed novel about communist Czechoslovakia, Notes from Underground, was published by Beaufort Books in 2014.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Beaufort Books
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 12, 2014
Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 216 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0825307287
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0825307287
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.06 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 1 x 9.1 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #578,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,053 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #1,213 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
- #2,275 in Historical British & Irish Literature
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Roger Scruton

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Roger Vernon Scruton, FBA, FRSL (/ˈskruːtən/; born 27 February 1944) is an English philosopher who specialises in aesthetics. He has written over thirty books, including Art and Imagination (1974), The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), Beauty (2009), How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012), Our Church (2012), and How to be a Conservative (2014). Scruton has also written several novels and a number of general textbooks on philosophy and culture, and he has composed two operas.

Scruton was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992. Since 1992, he has held part-time positions at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and the University of St Andrews. In 1982 he helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years, and he founded the Claridge Press in 1987. Scruton sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics, and is a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Scruton has been called "the man who, more than any other, has defined what conservatism is" by British MEP Daniel Hannan and "England’s most accomplished conservative since Edmund Burke" by The Weekly Standard.

Outside his career as a philosopher and writer, Scruton was involved in the establishment of underground universities and academic networks in Soviet-controlled Central Europe during the Cold War, and he has received a number of awards for his work in this area.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Pete Helme (http://www.rogerscruton.com) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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120 global ratings

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Customers find the book enjoyable. The historical content receives mixed reactions, with one customer describing it as a sadder history of communism in Czechoslovakia. The story quality also gets mixed reviews, with some customers finding it too sad.

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Enjoyment History Story quality

4 customers mention "Enjoyment"3 positive1 negative

Customers find the book enjoyable.

"I enjoyed the book and appreciated what Scruton was trying to accomplish...." Read more

"Not only a great read, but if you have ever been in the Czech republic, you’ll recognize the thoroughness of the books geography...." Read more

"...It was inexplicable, indescribable, but every time I opened the book and journeyed further in, the coil around my heart tightened...." Read more

"A splendid book with a gripping story and a sense of place." Read more

3 customers mention "History"2 positive1 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's historical content, with one customer finding it insightful, while another appreciates how it describes the communist culture of suspicion in Czechoslovakia.

"...somewhat also a love story, this work describes the happenings of communist culture of suspicion...." Read more

"...slow... A sad story of love illustrating the even sadder history of communism in Czechoslovakia." Read more

"...ever been in the Czech republic, you’ll recognize the thoroughness of the books geography...." Read more

3 customers mention "Story quality"2 positive1 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the story quality of the book, with some finding it too sad.

"...Who can be trusted? This brilliantly told story explores how life was led, not so long ago. One of the few books I have immediately reread...." Read more

"Beautifully written; a bit too sad; a bit too slow... A sad story of love illustrating the even sadder history of communism in Czechoslovakia." Read more

"A splendid book with a gripping story and a sense of place." Read more

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DaithRook
A gift of salt.
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2021
Format: KindleVerified Purchase

Me. Scruton, if you're reading this, you owe me two tablespoons of salt.

I'll admit, I have a calloused heart, jaded by time and grief. I seek out things that feel meaningful, that feel important, usually failing, but sometimes uncovering a gem. Very seldom am I moved to tears.

I noticed a certain tension welling up inside myself at the midpoint of the book, and it only grew stronger with every passing chapter. It was inexplicable, indescribable, but every time I opened the book and journeyed further in, the coil around my heart tightened.

I didn't know exactly what was happening to me as I read. I could feel the physical effects of emotion without truly understanding what machinations were at play in my mind. All I knew is that I couldn't stop.

Then, on this early morning on Feb 26th, just after midnight, I read the final sentence.

I put the book down. I walked back to my bedroom, crawled back under the covers with my sleeping fiance, and with my forehead pressed against her back, I silently cried my eyes out.

I have never been so moved by a work. I suspect I'll be unpacking this for a long time to come, and I welcome it. Please know that, for this reader, you have rocked his foundation and moved him to his core. You may very well have saved his life.

Amendment: After doing some rexearch, I was sad to find out that Sir Scruton passed away in early 2020. My message of thanks to him still stands. I hope it guides others to this excellent work.

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Stanley Turner
Very Interesting Work
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2020
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This is a very interesting work from Sir Roger Scruton on the last dying years of communist Czechoslovakia. Although somewhat also a love story, this work describes the happenings of communist culture of suspicion. I have read several works dealing with the communist culture suspicion, which this work ranks in the middle. Recommended...SLT

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Chris Maska
A Great Work
Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2020
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What does it mean to live under a regime that requires one to one affirm its lies? Notes from Underground answers this question by following the the life of a young man in the last days of communist Czechoslovakia. Lies and compromises are everywhere. Who can be trusted? This brilliantly told story explores how life was led, not so long ago. One of the few books I have immediately reread. Even at the end of the book, which ends long after the fall of the regime, it is not clear why key characters acted the way they did. But that is the point. A regime of the lie isolates people. Notes from Underground powerfully shows human interactions under great pressures. If you want to know what life was like in Czechoslovakia read this book.

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Integrity Reviews
Deep and disturbing
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2020
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Written with a profound knowledge of Czechoslovakian history and literature this is a complex, moving depiction of the tragic past of that nation under communism and the struggles of people trapped in that world to find love and meaning and eventually the freedom that poses many complexities and is not without its own destructive elements. Highly recommended, food for thought.

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M. A. D'Virgilio
I enjoyed the book and appreciated what Scruton was trying to ...
Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2014
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I enjoyed the book and appreciated what Scruton was trying to accomplish. Growing up through much of the Cold War I think it is important for generations who didn't to get a picture of what life was like when much of the world lived in totalitarian slavery. It is easy to take liberty for granted.

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Greg wallace
Insightful
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2018
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Not only a great read, but if you have ever been in the Czech republic, you’ll recognize the thoroughness of the books geography. Also, in light of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Czech republic, this was a timely read for me .

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Amazon Customer
To be completed
Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2017
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Nothing in print has grasped my attention like this in the past twenty years. There is so much more to say in the second version of this review.

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Amazon Customer
Beautifully written, a bit too sad, a bit too slow...
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2014
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Beautifully written; a bit too sad; a bit too slow... A sad story of love illustrating the even sadder history of communism in Czechoslovakia.

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William Younger
An amazing exploration of meaning
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 21, 2020
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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. Roger 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, looking back on the days of Soudruh Androš (Comrade Underground), his Pen-Name during the time he was an Author and, along with his mother, a distributer of samizdat literature in Prague and living a life underground, in fear of the StB (the state security police) and in fear of everyone around him just like almost everyone else.
Jan rides the underground metro, subtly people watching and writes 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 your 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-centeredness and a self-isolation that creeps into even your close relationships, you find out in the novel that there is a lot that Jan does not know about his mother despite them living together.
Betka, Jans 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, and the mystery of her plays constantly on his anxious and suspicious mind not yet completely rid of its underground shackles.
Jan and Betkas 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 where he learned, loved pledged vows before God and rediscovered the forbidden arts of Czechs 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:
1. Truth
2. Home
3. Love
4. Suffering
5. Christ
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, and it is 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.

Roger Scruton vividly illustrates the importance of language, culture, community, and local knowledge, these are things that create an idea of home and all things that are supressed 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 Gods 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.
When it comes to love, there are four main relationships in the book that I can think of that show many kinds of love and Scruton also describes many negative unloving relationships as opposites 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 narrators present place in America he has none of them.
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 page 88 in chapter 10:

“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 neighbors, 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, Roger 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 modern pop culture has made this observation in films like “The Matrix”, humans cannot exist in any meaningful way without suffering.
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 Roger 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 with Betka, as he is unable to believe that Christianity is not based on a fiction even as he’s confessing himself to Father Pavel in church.
The Novel is a deep investigation into meaning and its source, it very critical of western liberal capitalism and its doctrine of human rights as well as the Utopian Materialist ideals of the Soviet Communists, and it also has criticisms for Christianity although those are subtle, we see in the novel that Betka actively steers Jan toward 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, Betka showed Jan he to option to come up from underground. Then we must figure out where we are, where we came from and where we are going and 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”, maybe suggesting 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 and that 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.

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C.S. Morrissey
UBI AMOR IBI OCULUS
Reviewed in Canada on March 24, 2014
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
"Only the lover sees."

Read this extraordinary novel and find out what Comrade Underground sees when he enters into the light.

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jan
quality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 23, 2023
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
excellent

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Mrs Lucy Abel Smtih
It achieves this better than any modern novel
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 11, 2014
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Notes from the Underground evokes the feeling of distrust, suspicion yet hope and courage among the dissidents in pre 1989 Prague.It achieves this better than any modern novel. I t also touches on the unspoken ill-treatment of the Sudetans in Czechoslovakia in 1946 and the consequences especially in the countryside. Professor Scruton was there and it shows.

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T. W.
Great, but Sad Story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 21, 2020
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A wonderfully written look at a not-too-distant, depressing past in communist Czechoslovakia.

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5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing exploration of meaning

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5.0 out of 5 stars It achieves this better than any modern novel

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, but Sad Story

An amazing exploration of meaning

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It achieves this better than any modern novel

Great, but Sad Story