CONSERVATIVE

Roman Joch
A Literary Love
Roger Scruton, who celebrated his 70th birthday
last year, is a philosopher, farmer, and a gentleman. He
resides on his farm near the town of Malmesbury in the
southwest of England. This fact has inspired some to
refer to him as “the philosopher from Malmesbury”—
which should remind us that there once was another
well-known philosopher in the same town (but of very
different views): Thomas Hobbes.
Originally a professor of aesthetics, Scruton
has authored forty books dealing with vastly different
subjects—ranging from the aesthetics of architecture,
music, wine, and environmentalism, to modern
philosophy, the New Left, sexual desire, God, and fox
hunting. He has also composed two operas, developed
a TV series for the BBC (on the idea of beauty), and
has written several novels (including The Disappeared,
which appeared earlier this year).
His acclaimed 200-page novel, Notes from
Underground, was published last year. It deals with
many interrelated topics: love, nostalgia, life under
totalitarian rule in Prague during the 1980s, the lives
of dissidents, the sacred, human dignity, striving for
meaningful existence, faith, betrayal, disappointment,
and the unfulfilled promises of the changes that
occurred in November 1989.
The book is about the love that Scruton has
for the city of Prague and the Czech language. It is
also incredibly lyrical, with purposefully ambivalent
language and formulations, leaving much—including
the climax—open to the reader’s imagination.
Scruton is a fitting person for the job of writing
a book about life in Prague thirty years ago, since
between 1979 and 1989 he actively assisted Czech
dissidents, helping to smuggle censored books into
the country and recruiting Western lecturers for illegal
seminars of an “underground university”. (These were
typically held in private apartments.) Between 1979
and 1985, he visited the country frequently—until his
arrest by Communist State Security officials and his
subsequent—and, at the time, irrevocable—expulsion
from the country.
He returned only after the fall of Communism
in 1990 and held his first public lecture (in the town
of Brno) in which he called for authorities to ban the
Communist Party. For his contributions to the cause of
freedom in the Czech Republic, Scruton was awarded
a Medal of Merit of the 1st Class, by the late Czech
president, Václav Havel.
Notes from Underground is inspired by many of these
experiences. It is written in the form of a retrospective
from the point of view of the main character, Jan
Reichl, who, while sitting at his university office in
Washington, D.C., reminisces about the life he led as a
former political dissident.
Jan was not allowed to attend university. His
Notes from Underground
Roger Scruton
New York: Beaufort Books, 2014
father had been put in prison in the 1970s and he had
died there, too. His only crime had been running an
informal reading club, discussing authors like Kafka,
Dostoyevsky, and Camus with a few close friends.
After his father’s death, Jan stays with his
mother in Prague, works as a cleaner, and spends most
of his time “underground”—riding the city’s metro
lines. There he likes to read books belonging to his
father: Czech classics and authors from the period
of late Austro-Hungarian Empire, people like Franz
Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Stephan Zweig. He also
reads Dostoyevsky, whose Notes from the Underground
he carries around with him all the time. Inspired by
his literary heroes, Jan soon decides to pen several
short stories under the title Rumors and signs them as
“Comrade Androš”, the name derived from the Czech
term for “underground”—that is, a comrade from
under the ground.
His mother, who types copies of dissident
literature on a typewriter for others, then makes several
copies of Jan’s Rumors—until she eventually gets
The European Conservative 37