This paradoxalist was woven from a weird cloth. In around a hundred pages, our anti-hero – our ‘paradoxalist’, as Dostoevsky calls him – utters an unnerving yet strangely uplifting refrain. Before long, I could recite whole passages of his 1864 Notes From Underground by heart. I was a self-avowed underground man Dostoevsky populated my imagination. I was adrift, often between jobs – between tiresome, pointless office jobs that, in Liverpool, most people thought I was lucky to have.
They were heady times, full of crises and chaos, of psychological alienation and industrial annihilation, of punk rock and disco.ĭuring Britain’s ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1978–79, strikes and piled-up rubbish seemed the social order of the day. An OPEC oil embargo had sent advanced economies into giddy nosedives, and the Sex Pistols had released a debut single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’. I was serving my time, paying my penance, as a wages clerk at the dock board in Liverpool, England it was the 1970s. It was all I could do, of course, for not taking bribes, for not wanting in. Like him I was rude and enjoyed being rude. We hit it off immediately, despite our epochal differences, despite our age gap (he was forty), our different tongues. That could have been our initial bonding, the basis of our strange friendship.
It may have been because we were both clerks Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘underground man’, that is – he’d been a clerk, too, a petty clerk in the Russian civil service. SINCE MY LATE teens, I’ve had a penchant for Russian literature.
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