This is the Philosophy of Life podcast. My name is Reza Sanjideh and this is episode 34. The name of the episode is Stories and How They Shape Us. Today I want to speak about one story in particular, a story of a writer whose own life was itself a story about resilience and how his words, written more than a century ago, still speak to me and maybe to you as well. Let's begin. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Today we know him as one of the greatest writers of all time. But before the novels, before the fame, before the prison and the firing squad, there was a boy. A boy who grew up in poverty, surrounded by pain, and yet surrounded also by books. Dostoevsky's story begins not in palaces or privilege, but in the grounds of a hospital for the poor in Moscow. His father was a doctor, his mother a of deep faith tried to keep the family together through hardship. They had little money, but they had something far more powerful stories. In that hospital courtyard, young Fyodor saw suffering every day. The sick, the dying, the abandoned. He witnessed not only the body's weakness, but the soul's endurance. He saw despair, but also resilience. And it marked him forever. This was the soil where his writing took root, not wealth, not privilege, but the raw presence of human pain and human strength, childhood and education, building the foundation. Despite their poverty, the Dostoevsky family valued education. His mother subscribed to literary magazines, a sacrifice for a household with so little. And so, the boy was introduced early to the voices of the past, Pushkin, with his Russian poetry, Kolamzin, the historian, and Radcliffe, the Gothic novelist, Cervantes, with his wandering knight, Don Quixote. Even Homer, with the epic sweep of the Iliad and Odyssey. Each book was a window, each story a world. Dostoevsky devoured them. Later, at the Chermak boarding school, literature was emphasized above all. It was expensive, almost more than the family could afford. but it gave him structure. It gave him a deep foundation in language, history, and imagination. So, yes, he was poor. Yes, he grew up surrounded by hardship. But poverty did not silence him. Instead, it sharpened his sensitivity. It gave him the eyes to see the invisible, the ears to hear the cries at society's margins, the words to give them voice. From the beginning, Dostoevsky's writing was not smooth, not polished like the aristocratic novels of his time it was raw it was intense psychological his sentences carried the broken rhythms of real thought his characters argued contradicted themselves spoken fragments what critics would later call polyphonic many voices woven together was already there this was not just a technique it was his world for he had seen many worlds the refined pages of European novels Yes, but also the rough corridors of Moscow's hospital, the streets where beggars walked, the silent anguish of the poor. He blended these influences, literary brilliance and lived suffering into something new, a voice at once philosophical and painfully human, a voice that could pierce the soul. And so the question is this, how does a boy from poverty living on the edges of Moscow's hospital grounds grow into a writer whose words still shake us today? The answer is simple and yet profound. He paid attention, absorbed suffering. He read voraciously. He listened to voices high and low, Pushkin and Homer, but also the whispers of the poor, the cries of the sick, the silence of the abandoned. And he transformed it all into story, stories that did not just entertain, but interrogated, stories that forced us to ask, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to suffer? What does it mean to change? Dostoevsky, a writer whose life was itself a story, a man who faced death, who stood before a firing squad and in the very last moment was spared. Instead of dying, he was sent to Siberia, years of prison, exile, and hard labor. From that situation, suffering came his voice, a voice that shaped not only Russian literature, but the way we understand the human soul. Fyodor Dostoevsky was born into poverty in 19th century Russia. As a young man, he was arrested for attending intellectual circles and accused of conspiracy. The sentence was death. He stood blindfolded, waiting for the guns to fire. But at the final moment, his punishment was changed to exile and hard labor. Later, he would write, in those minutes before death, life itself became infinite. Every leaf, every breath, every human glance had meaning. Years later, Dostoevsky wrote one of his shortest but most powerful books, Notes from Underground. Its narrator is a nameless man, bitter, angry, full of contradictions. He hides in the underground of his own mind, locked in a war with himself and with society. He begins with words that are unforgettable. I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. He attacks reason. He rejects progress. He mocks the idea of happiness. But more than anything, he criticizes himself. This underground man is a mirror, dark, distorted, but honest. Why does this story endure? Because hidden in the bitterness, there is a small but fundamental change. The underground man realizes that humans are not machines of reason. We want choice, even if that choice leads to suffering, even if that choice destroys us. Because freedom, the ability to say yes or no, matters more than comfort. That tiny realization that human life is built on freedom and contradiction This story has never died. It is why Dostoevsky's voice still speaks to us. And it is why stories matter. Because they carry not just events, but the shifts that define what it means to be human. Now we turn to Notes from Underground. This book, published in 1864, is short, barely 100 pages. And yet, it changed the course of literature. Some even call it the very first modern novel. Why? Because instead of telling us a neat story, Dostoevsky takes us inside a broken mind. We are not given heroes. We are not given comfort. We are given chaos. And in that chaos, something feels uncomfortable. The narrator has no name. We know him only as the underground man. Bitter. Angry. Contradictory. And he introduces himself with unforgettable words. I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. This is not a hero. This is a confession. And yet, strangely, he's honest. draws us in. We begin to listen. The first part of the book is his manifesto. It is long, messy, full of contradictions. The underground man rants against the great belief of his century that reason and science would solve everything. He mocks this belief with words that still sting two times two makes four. Why? In my opinion, it's simply insufferable. 2x2 makes 4 stands across your path. Arms akimbo and it spits. I agree that 2x2 makes 4 is an excellent thing. But if we are to give everything it's due, 2x2 makes 5 is sometimes a very charming little thing as well. For him, logic is not enough. Because humans will never live by equations. We crave freedom even if it destroys us. He insists that if you build a perfect system, people will smash it, just to prove they can. He says, In the second part, we see this philosophy lived out in his own life. He humiliates himself in front of old schoolmates. He lashes out at Lisa, a young prostitute who shows him kindness. He pushes people away, even when he longs for connection. He destroys every chance at dignity. And here, too, his voice is unflinching. He says to people, Maybe to us directly. his most haunting ideas, that suffering is not an obstacle, but a source of life. He declares, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. I said it then, I say it now. A man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering. For him, to live without suffering is not to live at all. Pain is the proof of existence. And in that conviction, we hear echoes of Dostoevsky himself So, what kind of story is Notes from Underground? It is not a story of redemption. It is not a story of comfort. It is a mirror, a dark, distorted, but honest mirror. It shows us our contradictions, our stubborn freedom, our love of suffering. It forces us to ask and painfully alive. When I read Dostoevsky's notes from underground, I don't just see a character in a book. I see myself. Not in every detail, of course, but in the contradictions, in the alienation, in the sense of being trapped and still searching. Because I, too, have lived moments where life itself seemed broken, where the world felt heavy, and where the only choice left was to carry more knowledge, even if it made me feel Let me tell you why. When I left Iran, I was only 24 years old. I had just come out of the military. Iran was in the middle of war with Iraq. The revolution had closed the universities. Jobs had disappeared. Society was hurt, uncertain, and suffocating for young people. I considered myself a political activist on the left, and I could see what was happening around me. A government of religious fundamentalism. Injustice everywhere. No future that I could believe in. So I decided to leave. But leaving was not simple. The greatest obstacle was not the state, but my family. My father. He was old. He was blind. I was very close to him. When I was 8 years old, I used to take him to work and then bring him home. It was me and my brother Hamid. but Hamid had already left Iran. I was the only one there. It was painful, painful to even imagine leaving my father behind. My younger brother was only 15, too young to take care of him. My older brother was married, separate from us, busy with his own life. And another brother, Ali, was lost in addiction, gone from home. I remember that moment with pain. But I also knew I had no I spoke with my father, with my mother. My mother was hesitant. But my father was blind, old, and wise. He gave me permission. He knew. He let me go. And so I left Iran, carrying that wound with me. Germany was not paradise. Compared to Iran, yes, it seemed free, but it was also cold. Culturally cold. The German language itself felt like mathematics. If you didn't know the rules, you couldn't play the game. And me, I realized in Germany that I didn't even know the rules of my own Persian language. I had spoken it since childhood, but I had never studied it. To learn German, I had to first learn Persian grammar, Persian logic, Persian structure. Only then could I begin to make sense of German. And all of this was happening while I was waiting. Waiting for four years, for asylum to be approved. In those years, I couldn't study, couldn't go to class, couldn't learn properly. I worked. In the morning, I delivered newspapers. In the afternoon, I worked in restaurants. Day after day, year after year. Germany was tough. The people could be harsh. The two questions I always heard, where are you from? And when are you going back? Not, who are you? Not, what do you dream of? But, when will you leave? I felt it every day. I was a foreigner. I was underground. During those years, my father passed away. I was far away. My marriage struggled. We were young, without money, without stability. My wife missed her mother, her daughter, her family in Tehran. I missed mine too, but I tried to hide it. I thought if I spoke of my And this is why I relate to Dostoevsky. Because the underground man also hides, also swallows, also lives in silence. His words cut because I recognize them. When he says, I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man, I hear not just his voice, but echoes of my own life in exile. Not sick in the body, but sick with loneliness. Not spiteful by nature, but hardened by survival. Not unattractive in form, but invisible in a foreign land. These years in Germany were my underground. A place of waiting, of silence, of contradictions. On the surface I was working, surviving. Inside I was restless, broken, searching. And like Dostoevsky's Underground Man, I learned that reason was not enough. Logic doesn't solve the heart. Equation don't cure loneliness. But stories do something else. Stories give form to chaos. They carry meaning where explanation fail. They let me see that my pain was not mine alone. That others across time, across nation, had walked the same path. And in that recognition, I was not safe. But I was not alone. And sometimes, that is enough. I began this episode with Dostoevsky. I ended with myself. And somewhere between his words and my life, there is a bridge. That bridge is story. And so I leave you with this. We are not alone in our suffering. We are not alone in our contradictions. As long as we can tell our stories, we remain human. And that is enough. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please like it, share it, and help me keep these stories alive.