15 Ibid., 362; April 13, 1864.
16 Ibid., 365.
17 Ibid., 1: 142; February 20, 1854.
18 Ibid., 58; January 1, 1840.
19 Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Baltimore, 1963), 224–225.
CHAPTER 30
Notes from Underground
If philosophy among other vagaries were also to have the notion that it could occur to a man to act in accordance with its teaching, one might make out of this a queer comedy.
—Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Few works in modern literature are more widely read than Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol’ya) or so often cited as a key text revelatory of the hidden depths of the sensibility of our time. The term “underground man” has become part of the vocabulary of contemporary culture, and this character has now achieved—like Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust—the stature of one of the great archetypal literary creations. Most important cultural developments of the present century—Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, expressionism, surrealism, crisis theology, existentialism—have claimed the underground man as their own or have been linked with him by zealous interpreters; and when the underground man has not been hailed as a prophetic anticipation, he has been held up to exhibition as a luridly repulsive warning. The underground man has thus entered into the very warp and woof of modern culture in a fashion testifying to the philosophical suggestiveness and hypnotic power of this first great creation of Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian years.
Notes from Underground attracted little attention when first published (no critical notice was taken of it in any Russian journal). In 1883, N. K. Mikhailovsky wrote his all-too-influential article, “A Cruel Talent,” citing some of its more sadistic passages and arguing that the utterances and actions of the character illustrated Dostoevsky’s own “tendencies to torture.”1 Eight years later, writing from an opposed ideological perspective, V. V. Rozanov interpreted the work as essentially inspired by Dostoevsky’s awareness of the irrational depths of the human soul, with all its conflicting impulses for evil as well as for good. No world order based on reason and rationality could possibly contain this seething chaos of the human psyche; only religion (Eastern Orthodoxy) could aid man to overcome his capricious and destructive propensities.2
It was evident from the day of publication that Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was an attack, particularly in Part I, on Chernyshevsky’s philosophy of “rational egoism,” but up to the early 1920s interpreters paid little attention to this ancient quarrel, which was considered only incidental and of no artistic importance. It was assumed that Dostoevsky had been aroused by opposition to Chernyshevsky but had used radical ideas only as a foil. Chernyshevsky had believed that man was innately good and amenable to reason, and that, once enlightened as to his true interests, he would be able, with the help of reason and science, to construct a perfect society. Dostoevsky may have also believed man to be capable of good, but he considered him equally full of evil, irrational, capricious, and destructive inclinations, and, or so interpreters argued, it was this disturbing truth that he presented through the underground man as an answer to Chernyshevsky’s naïve optimism.
Such a simplistic reading can hardly be sustained after a little reflection, for it would require us to consider Dostoevsky as just about the worst polemicist in all of literary history. He was, after all, supposedly writing to dissuade readers from accepting Chernyshevsky’s ideas. Could he really have imagined that anyone in his right mind would prefer the life of the underground man to the radiant happiness of Chernyshevsky’s denizens of Utopia? Obviously not, and since Dostoevsky was anything but a fool, it may be assumed that the invention of the underground man was not inspired by any such self-defeating notion. In reality, as another line of interpretation soon began to make clear, his attack on Chernyshevsky and the radicals is far more intricate and cunning than had previously been suspected.
The first true glimpse into the artistic logic of Notes from Underground appears in an article by V. L. Komarovich, who in 1921 pointed out that Dostoevsky’s novella was structurally dependent on What Is To Be Done?3 Whole sections of the work in the second part—the attempt of the underground man to bump into an officer on the Nevsky Prospect, for example, or the famous encounter with the prostitute Liza—are modeled on episodes in Chernyshevsky’s book, and are obvious parodies that inverted the meaning of those episodes in their original context. But Komarovich continued to regard the imprecations of the underground man against “reason” in the first part simply as a straightforward argument with Utilitarianism. The underground man was still speaking for Dostoevsky and could be identified with the author’s own position.
A further decisive advance was made a few years later by A. Skaftymov, who, without raising the issue of parody, argued that the negative views of the underground man could in no way be taken to represent Dostoevsky’s own position, because such an identification would constitute a flagrant repudiation of all the moral ideals that he was upholding in his journalism. “The underground man in Notes,” wrote Skaftymov, “is not only the accuser but also one of the accused,” whose insults are as much (if not more) directed against himself as against others, and whose self-destructive existence by no means represents anything that Dostoevsky was approving. Skaftymov also perceptively remarks that Dostoevsky’s strategy is that of destroying his opponents “from within, carrying their logical presuppositions and possibilities to their consistent conclusion and arriving at a destructively helpless blind alley.”4
These words provide an essential insight into one of the main features of Dostoevsky’s technique as an ideological novelist, but although fully aware that the novella is “a polemical work,” Skaftymov fails to see how this polemical intent enters into the very creation of the character of the underground man. Skaftymov’s analysis of the text thus remains on the level of moral-psychological generalities and does not penetrate to the heart of Dostoesky’s conception. This can be reached, in my view, only by combining and extending Komarovich’s remarks on the parodistic element in Notes from Underground with Skaftymov’s perception of how the underground man dramatizes within himself the ultimate consequences of the position that Dostoevsky was opposing. In other words, the underground man is not only a moral-psychological type whose egoism Dostoevsky wishes to expose, he is also a social-ideological one, whose psychology must be seen as intimately interconnected with the ideas he accepts and by which he tries to live.
Dostoevsky overtly pointed to this aspect of the character in the footnote appended to the title of the novella. “Both the author of the Notes and the Notes themselves,” he writes, “are of course fictitious. Nonetheless, such persons as the author of such memoirs not only may, but must, exist in our society, if we take into consideration the circumstances that led to the formation of our society. . . . He is one of the representatives of a generation that is still with us” (5: 99). Dostoevsky here is obviously referring to the formation of Russian society, which, as he could expect all readers of Epoch to know—had he not explained this endlessly in his articles in Time?—had been formed by the successive waves of European influence that had washed over Russia since the time of Peter the Great. The underground man must exist as a type because he is the inevitable product of such a cultural formation, and his character does in fact embody and reflect two phases of this historical evolution. He is, in short, conceived as a parodistic persona whose life exemplifies the tragic-comic impasses resulting from the effects of such influences on the Russian national psyche.
His diatribes in the first part thus do not arise, as has commonly been thought, because of his rejection of reason; on the contrary, they result from his acceptance of all the implications of reason in its then-current Russian incarnation—and particularly, all those consequences that advocates of reason such as Chernyshevsky blithely chose to disregard. In the second part, Dostoevsky extends the same technique to those more sentimental-humanitarian elements of Chernyshev
sky’s ideology that had resuscitated some of the atmosphere of the 1840s.
Dostoevsky’s footnote thus attempted to alert his audience to the satirical and parodistic nature of his conceptions, but it was too oblique to serve its purpose. Like many other examples of first-person satirical parody, Notes from Underground has usually been misunderstood and taken straight. Indeed, the intrinsic danger of such a form, used for such a purpose, is that it tends to wipe out any critical distance between the narrator and reader and makes it difficult to see through the character to the target of the satire. This danger can be avoided only if, as in Gulliver’s Travels, the reader is disoriented from the start by the incongruity of the situation, or if in other ways—linguistic exaggerations or manifestly grotesque behavior—he is made aware that the I-narrator is as much a literary convention as a genuine character. Although Dostoevsky makes some attempt to supplement his footnote in this direction, these efforts were not sufficient to balance the overwhelming psychological presence of the underground man and the force of his imprecations and anathemas against some of the most cherished dogmas of modern civilization. As a result, the parodistic function of his character has always been obscured by the immense vitality of its artistic embodiment, and it has, paradoxically, been Dostoevsky’s very genius for the creation of character that has most interfered with the proper understanding of Notes from Underground.
If we are interested in grasping Dostoevsky’s own point of view, as far as this can be reconstructed, then we must take Notes from Underground for what it was initially meant to be—a brilliantly Swiftian satire, remarkable for the finesse of its conception and the brio of its execution, which dramatizes the dilemmas of a representative Russian personality attempting to live by the two European codes whose unhappy effects Dostoevsky explores. And though the sections have a loose narrative link, the novella is above all a diptych depicting two episodes of a symbolic history of the Russian intelligentsia.
Part I
1. The Dialectic of Determinism
The first segment of Notes from Underground extends from Chapter 1 through Chapter 6, and its famous opening tirade gives us an unforgettable picture of the underground man stewing in his Petersburg “corner” and mulling over the peculiarities of his character and his life: “I am a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased.” He is ill but refuses to see a doctor, though he respects medicine: “Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let’s say sufficiently so to respect medicine.” Medicine of course had become the science after Bazarov, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov, but the underground man sarcastically labels excessive respect for medicine as itself just an irrational superstition. He knows he should visit a doctor, but somehow—really for no good reason, simply out of spite—he prefers to stay home, untreated. Why? “You probably will not understand that,” he says. “Well, I understand it” (5: 99). Whatever the explanation, there is a clear conflict between a rational course of behavior and some obscure feeling labeled “spite.”
We then learn that the underground man is an ex-civil servant, now retired, who in the past had engaged in incessant battles to tyrannize the humble petitioners that came his way in the course of business. But while he had enjoyed this sop to his ego, he confesses that “I might foam at the mouth, but bring me some kind of toy, give me a cup of tea with sugar, and I would be appeased.” The underground man’s nature is by no means vicious and evil; he is more than ordinarily responsive to any manifestation of friendliness, but such responses are carefully kept bottled up no matter how strongly he might feel them: “Every moment I was conscious in myself of many, many elements completely opposed to that [spite]. . . . I knew that they had been teeming in me all my life, begging to be let out, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely would not let them” (5: 100).
The underground man is shown as being caught in a conflict between the egoistic aspects of his character and the sympathetic, outgoing ones that he also possesses, but these latter are continually suppressed in favor of the former. We see him torn apart by an inner dissonance that prevents him from behaving in what might be considered a “normal” fashion—that is, acting in terms of self-interest and “reason” in Part I, where the underground man talks to himself or to an imaginary interlocutor, or giving unhindered expression to his altruistic (or at least amiably social) impulses in Part II, where he is living in society in relation to others. What prevents him from doing so is precisely what Dostoevsky wishes to illuminate and explore.
The nature of these impediments becomes clear only gradually in Part I as the underground man continues to expose all his defects to the scornful contemplation of his assumed reader. For it turns out that the contradictory impulses struggling within him have literally paralyzed his character. “Not only could I not become spiteful,” he says, “I could not even become anything neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.” The underground man’s only consolation is that “an intelligent man in the nineteenth-century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a limited creature,” and he boastfully attributes his characterlessness to the fact that he is “hyperconscious.” As a result of this “hyperconsciousness,” he was “most capable of recognizing every refinement of ‘all the sublime and the beautiful,’ as we used to say at one time” (the 1840s). But “the more deeply I sank into my mire the more capable I became of sinking into it completely” (5: 100, 102).
This strange state of moral impotence, which the underground man both defends and despises, is complicated by the further admission that he positively enjoys the experience of his own degradation. “I reached the point,” he confesses, “of feeling a sort of secret, abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, and being acutely conscious that that day I had again done something loathsome, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnaw, gnaw at myself for it, nagging and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and finally into real positive enjoyment” (5: 102).
The underground man frankly admits to being an unashamed masochist, and all too many commentators are happy to accept this admission as a sufficient explanation of his behavior. To do so, however, simply disregards the relation of the underground man’s psychology to his social-cultural formation. For he goes on to explain that his sense of enjoyment is derived from “the hyperconsciousness of [his] own degradation,” a hyperconsciousness that persuaded him of the impossibility of becoming anything else or of behaving in any other way even if he had wished to do so. “For the root of it all,” he says, “was that it all proceeded according to the normal and fundamental laws of hyperconsciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing” (5: 102).
This passage has often been taken as a reference to the underground man’s “Hamletism,” which links him with such figures as the protagonists of Turgenev’s “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District” and “Diary of a Superfluous Man,” both of whom are destroyed by an excess of consciousness that unfits them for the possibilities offered by their lives. Such thematic resemblances need not be denied, but this pervasive motif in Russian literature of the 1850s and 1860s is given a special twist by Dostoevsky and shown as the unexpected consequence of the doctrines advanced by the very people who had attacked the “Hamlets” most violently—the radicals of the 1860s themselves. For the pseudoscientific terms of the underground man’s claim of “hyperconsciousness” are a parody of Chernyshevsky, and the statement is a paraphrase of Chernyshevsky’s assertion, in The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy, that no such capacity as free will exists or can exist, since whatever actions man attributes to his own initiative are really a result of the “laws of nature.” The underground man reveals the effects on his character of the “hyperconsciousness” derived from a knowledge of su
ch “laws,” and thus mockingly exemplifies what such a doctrine really means in practice.
He imagines, for instance, that he wishes to forgive someone magnanimously for having slapped him in the face, but the more he thinks about it, the more impossible such an intention becomes. “After all, I would probably never have been able to do anything with my magnanimity—neither to forgive, for my assailant may have slapped me because of the laws of nature, and one cannot forgive the laws of nature; nor to forget, for even if it were the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same.” Or suppose he wishes to act the other way round—not to forgive magnanimously, but to take revenge. How can one take revenge when no one is to blame for anything? “You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the insult becomes fate rather than an insult, something like a toothache, for which no one is to blame.” This is why, as the underground man asserts, “the direct, legitimate, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia—that is, conscious sitting on one’s hands.” Or, if one does not sit on one’s hands but acts—say on the matter of revenge—then “it would only be out of spite” (5: 103, 108–109). Spite is not a valid cause for any kind of action, and hence it is the only one left when the laws of nature make any justified response impossible.
In such passages, the moral vacuum created by the thoroughgoing acceptance of determinism is depicted with masterly psychological insight. As a well-trained member of the intelligentsia, the underground man intellectually accepts such determinism, but it is impossible for him really to live with its conclusions. “Thus it would follow, as the result of hyperconsciousness, that one is not to blame for being a scoundrel, as though that were any consolation to the scoundrel once he himself has come to realize that he actually is a scoundrel.” Or, as regards the slap in the face, it is impossible to forget because “even if it were the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same” (5: 102–103). Dostoevsky thus juxtaposes a total human reaction—a sense of self-revulsion at being a scoundrel, an upsurge of anger at the insult of being slapped—against a scientific rationale that dissolves all such moral-emotive feelings and hence the very possibility of a human response. Reason tells the underground man that guilt or indignation is totally irrational and meaningless, but conscience and a sense of dignity continue to exist all the same as ineradicable components of the human psyche.
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