the underground man lives

stepping onto a crowded morning train, amidst the tired and weary eyes of late commuters, delfly but hurrily i retrieved my nondescript Russian novel and buried myself inside the volumous pages of words. the first visual moments of Romans-fonted English alphabets on cheap coarse-grained paper, creating an orderly and abstract world of black and white, brought an instant comfort and relief. incidental neighbors' piercing glances, flickering like flash lights of a coordinated search party, were no longer manacing, or even intrusive. i was in the underground, where only the rhythmic humming of the running train was audible, urging me to dive deeper down the underworld of beastly men and cultic intelligentia of a bygone time. when i no longer saw crafty prose and cutting words, but a wry face of a greasily old baffoon, spitting venomous lies and stirring up a scandal out of pure spite and self-indulgence, i knew i have arrived at my destination.
it is late 19th century, and mother Russia is invaded by waves of western European ideologies, slowly roasting a land of complacent aristocrats and innocuous peasantry into a burning sea of revisions and transfigurations. But the heart of Russia is strong and must live on! Surely the onslaught of the nose and the overcoat, the talking pups and the self-annointed king of Spain, none of which will deter the will of the history-hardened and culturally rich collective. may the devil run wild and fortunes land where they choose; the Mighty watches and will forever be. thus set the stage for a tale old and seemingly familiar, yet dark and tantalizingly captivating -- the epic Karamazov family drama. let the red curtain rise and the orchestra begin. this one is for the ages.