Dostoevsky

by Frank, Joseph

  This confusion arises in the course of a comparison between the Crystal Palace and a chicken coop. “You see,” says the underground man, “if it were not a palace but a chicken coop, and it started to rain, I might creep into the chicken coop to avoid getting wet, but all the same I would not take the chicken coop for a palace out of gratitude that it sheltered me from the rain. You laugh, you even say that, in such circumstances, a chicken coop and a mansion—it’s all the same. Yes, I answer, if one has to live simply to avoid getting wet.” It is not the usefulness of the chicken coop that is impugned by the underground man but the fact that, in return for its practical advantages, it has been elevated into mankind’s ideal. “But what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that this [not to get wet; utility] is not the only object in life, and that if one must live, it may as well be in a mansion? That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate it when you have changed my desire. Well, do change it, tempt me with something else, give me another ideal” (5: 120).

  The underground man thus opens up the possibility of “another ideal,” and, as the text goes along, he seems to envisage a different sort of Crystal Palace—one that would be a genuine mansion rather than a chicken coop satisfying purely material needs. For he then continues: “And meanwhile, I will not take a chicken coop for a palace. Let the Crystal edifice even be an idle dream, say it is inconsistent with the laws of nature, and I have invented it only as a result of my own stupidity, as a result of some old-fashioned, irrational habits of my generation. But what do I care if it is inconsistent? Isn’t it all the same if it exists in my desires, or better, exists as long as my desires exist?” (5: 120). At this point, we observe a shift to a “Crystal edifice” based on the very opposite principles from those represented by the Crystal Palace throughout the rest of the text; this new Crystal edifice is inconsistent with the laws of nature (while the Crystal Palace is their embodiment) and owes its existence to desire rather than to reason. The change is so abrupt, and so incompatible with what has gone before, that one can only assume some material leading from one type of Crystal building to the other has been excised from the manuscript.

  Dostoevsky, we may speculate, must have attempted here to indicate the nature of a true Crystal Palace, or mansion, or edifice (his terminology is not consistent), and to contrast it to the false one that was really a chicken coop. From his letter, we know that he did so in a way to identify a true Crystal Palace with the “need for faith and Christ,” but such an attempt may well have confused and frightened the censors, still terrified out of their wits by the recent blunder over What Is To Be Done? and now accustomed to view the Crystal Palace as the abhorrent image of atheistic Socialism. Hence, they would have excised the sentences in which Dostoevsky tried to give his own Christian significance to this symbol, perhaps considering them to be both subversive and blasphemous. These suppositions would explain the strange history of Dostoevsky’s text and would account for the flagrant contradiction, clearly evident on close reading, that provoked his indignant outcry that his entire meaning had been distorted.

  Although this alternative ideal may have originally been indicated more clearly, Dostoevsky’s conception still requires the underground man to remain trapped in the negative phase of his revolt. An alternative is suggested only as a remote and, for the underground man, unattainable possibility. Each episode in the original text was meant to have its own type of climax, and there would have been a distinct gradation between the first and the second ideal. What appears in the underground man’s thoughts only as an impossible dream in the first part becomes a living reality in the second, strongly presented in terms of dramatic action. For the underground man in this first part longs for another ideal; he knows it must exist; but he is so committed to a belief in material determinism and the laws of nature that he cannot imagine what it could be. “I know, anyway, that I will not be appeased with a compromise, with an endlessly recurring zero, simply because it exists according to the laws of nature and actually exists. I will not take as the crown of all my desires—a block of buildings with apartments for the poor on a lease for a thousand years, and, for any contingency, a dentist’s sign hanging out” (5: 120). What that something else is, and why the underground man cannot find it, provides the substance for the second part of Dostoevsky’s novella.

  Part II

  1. “Apropos of the Wet Snow”

  The underground man is forty years old in 1864 when he begins to write his Notes; he is twenty-four when the events in Part II take place, which would locate them in 1848—the very year that Dostoevsky first assiduously began to attend the meetings of the Petrashevsky Circle. The underground man is still primarily a social-cultural type, but in the second part, where he becomes a parody of the attitudes of the 1840s, he was certainly nourished by Dostoevsky’s judgment of himself as a member of that generation. Evaluating his state of mind at that time, Dostoevsky had written to General Totleben in 1856: “I believed in theories and Utopias. . . . I was a hypochondriac. . . . I was excessively irritable with an unhealthy susceptibility. I deformed the simplest facts, endowing them with another aspect and other dimensions.”7 This description applies, word for word, to the portrait we are given of the underground man’s psychology in his youth.

  The subtitle, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” also helps to set the action firmly in a symbolic setting. Annenkov had noted in 1849 that the writers of the Natural School were all fond of employing “wet snow” as a typical feature of the dreary Petersburg landscape, and Dostoevsky thus uses his subtitle to bring back an image of Petersburg in the 1840s—an image of what, in the first part, Dostoevsky had called “the most abstract and premeditated city in the world” (5: 101), a city whose very existence (ever since Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman”) had become emblematic in Russian literature for the violence and inhuman cost of the Russian adaptation to Western culture.

  The atmosphere of the 1840s, with all its social humanitarian exaltations, is also evoked explicitly by the quotation from a poem of Nekrasov appended as an epigraph to the second part. This is the same poem, dating from 1846, that had already been mentioned ironically in The Village of Stepanchikovo, the first work in which Dostoevsky explicitly dissociated himself from what he now considered the naïve illusions of the Natural School and of his own past. Written from the point of view of the (male) benefactor of a repentant prostitute who has saved her from a life of sin by his ardent and unprejudiced love, the poem describes her torments of conscience:

  When from the murk of corruption

  I delivered your fallen soul

  With the ardent speech of conviction;

  And, full of profound torment,

  Wringing your hands, you cursed

  The vice that had ensnared you;

  When, with memories punishing

  Forgetful conscience

  You told me the tale

  Of all that happened before me,

  And suddenly, covering your face,

  Full of shame and horror,

  You tearfully resolved,

  Outraged, shocked . . .

  Etc., etc., etc. (5: 124)

  By cutting this passage short with three et ceteras, Dostoevsky manifestly indicates that the philanthropic lucubrations of the speaker are just so much banal and conventional platitudes. The redemption of a prostitute theme had indeed become a commonplace by the 1860s. It figures as a minor episode in What Is To Be Done?, where one of the heroes salvages a fallen woman from a life of debauchery, lives with her for a time, and turns her into a model member of Vera Pavlovna’s cooperative until she dies of tuberculosis. The climactic episode in the second part of Notes from Underground—the encounter between the underground man and the prostitute Liza—is an ironic parody and reversal of this Social Romantic cliché.

  Part II of Notes from Underground, then, satirizes the sentimental Social Romanticism of the 1840s just as Part I satirized the metaphysics and ethics of the 1860s, and Dostoevsky draws for th
is purpose on the image of the 1840s he had already sketched in the pages of Time. The superfluous men of the gentry liberal intelligentsia lived in a dream world of “universal beneficence” while neglecting the simplest and most obvious moral obligations. It was incumbent on them, he had made clear, to live up to their own pretensions and to turn their abstract love of humanity into a concrete act directed toward a flesh-and-blood individual. This is precisely the theme of the second part of Notes from Underground, which has been transposed into the bureaucratic world of Dostoevsky’s early work and embodied in a character who is the lowly but supremely self-conscious equivalent of the superfluous man.

  This shift of theme is reflected in Part II by a noticeable change of tone. Ultimate issues were at stake in the first part, where the final argument against the world of the “false” Crystal Palace could only be the rage of madness and self-destruction, and Dostoevsky’s irony is accordingly bitter and twisted, his tonality harsh and abrasive. No such ultimate issues are involved in the misadventures of the underground man’s early manhood, which are all provoked by that standard comic source—overweening vanity. Hence the second part is written in a lighter tone of burlesque and caricature, and whole sections are nothing but an extended mockery of the underground man’s stilted and pedantic responses to the simplest human situations.

  2. The Dialectic of Vanity

  The opening pages of the second part recall the beginning of the first. The conflict between the impulse to dominate and the desire to enter into a more amicable relation with others was not developed at all earlier, but it now comes to the fore and provides a more intimate background to the relative abstractions of Part I. The underground man, consumed by boundless vanity, is so acutely self-conscious that he cannot enter into normal social relations with anyone: “All my fellow clerks I, of course, hated from first to last, and I despised them all, and yet at the same time I was, as it were, afraid of them. . . . Somehow it then turned out this way quite suddenly: one moment I despised them, the next I placed them much above me” (5: 125). The underground man’s vanity convinces him of his own superiority and he despises everyone, but since he desires such superiority to be recognized by others, he hates the world for its indifference and falls into self-loathing at his own humiliating dependence. This is the psychological dialectic of a self-conscious egoism that seeks to conquer recognition from the world and only arouses dislike and hostility in return. Such a dialectic of vanity parallels the dialectic of determinism in the first part and has the same effect of immuring the ego in a world alienated from any human contact. Just as determinism dissolves the possibility of human response in the first part, so vanity blocks all social fraternity in the second.

  Besides portraying this dialectic of vanity in action, Dostoevsky also traces it back to the general cultural atmosphere of the 1840s, which fostered a forced and artificial Romantic egoism and a sense of superiority to ordinary Russian life that the underground man absorbed through every pore. Indeed, what distinguishes him from the very earliest years is his marked intellectual prowess. “Moreover, they [his school fellows] all began to grasp slowly,” he writes, “that I was already reading books none of them could read, and understood things . . . of which they had not even heard.” Describing his later life, he says: “at home I spent most of my time reading. . . . I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by . . . reading. Reading, of course, was a great help” (5: 140, 127). Books are thus responsible for keeping the real feelings of the underground man bottled up—the feelings opposed to his vanity and desire to dominate. Books interpose a network of acquired and artificial responses between himself and other people, and, since we are in the world of the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, these books could only have been the works of the French Utopian Socialists and the Social Romantics and their Russian disciples on which Dostoevsky himself had then battened.

  Over and over again Dostoevsky stresses the connection between the dialectic of vanity in which the underground man is caught and his intellectual culture. “A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain,” he remarks, “without setting an inordinately high standard for himself, and without despising himself at certain moments to the point of hatred.” Comparing his features with those of other clerks in his office, he thinks, “Let my face even be ugly . . . but let it be noble, expressive, and, above all, extremely intelligent” (5: 125, 124). As a result of imbibing the European culture popular in Russia in the 1840s, the underground man has lost any capacity for simple and direct human feeling in relation to others. Instead, his vanity and sense of self-importance have become inflated to a degree out of all proportion to his actual social situation, and the conflicts engendered by this discrepancy provide a comic analogue to the fratricidal war of all against all arising in Western European society from the dominance of the principle of egoistic individualism.

  Dostoevsky is a master at portraying the psychology of pride and humiliation, and when the humiliation springs from some genuine oppression or suffering, he knows how to make it intensely moving, but it would be a flagrant misreading to take the underground man as such a victim. For he lives in a purely imaginary world and distorts and exaggerates everything with which he comes into contact. “It is perfectly clear to me now,” he says, “that, owing to my unbounded vanity and, probably, to the high standard I set for myself, I very often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same view to everyone” (5: 141).

  Even if his humiliations are entirely self-caused, their effect on him is no less distressing. His inability to enter into human contact with other people plunges him into a savage isolation, and he is acutely aware that his behavior is debasing and degrading: “I indulged my vice in solitude at night, furtively, timidly, filthily, with a feeling of shame that never deserted me, even at the most loathsome moments, and which at such moments drove me to curses. Even then I already had the underground in my soul” (5: 128). The reference to vice at this point foreshadows the all-important Liza episode, but in these earlier chapters, filled with comic grotesquerie, the emphasis falls on the underground man’s efforts to break out of his solitude through purely social (rather than sexual) intercourse.

  All these episodes display the torments of the underground man as he attempts to assert his existence as an ego who desires above all that someone—anyone—recognize him in a fashion compatible with his absurdly inflated self-image. It is for this reason that he becomes involved in the slapstick, mock-heroic farce of trying to summon up enough courage to bump into an officer on the Nevsky Prospect. His preoccupation with this ridiculous problem merely illustrates the picayune obsessiveness of his vanity; but the episode is also a parody of an incident in What Is To Be Done? One of the heroes of that book takes a solemn resolution not to yield the right of way in the street to “dignitaries,” and when an outraged gentleman begins to berate the poorly dressed student for bumping into him, the dignitary promptly ends up with his face in the mud.

  Ironically reversing the scale of values manifested by this democratic protest against the public humiliations of inequality, Dostoevsky depicts the frantic desire of the underground man to assert his “equality” as ludicrous vanity rather than staunchly independent self-respect. The parody of Chernyshevsky is coupled with an allusion to Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” which Dostoevsky slips in at the point where the underground man, feverishly preparing the proper costume for his epical encounter, decides to replace the hideous raccoon collar on his overcoat with a more dignified one of beaver. Not only does this detail thicken the period atmosphere (Gogol’s story was published in 1842), it also enriches the ideological implications of the incident, since Gogol’s work provided the initial inspiration for the philanthropic thematics of the Natural School of young writers to which Dostoevsky had once belonged.

  The theme of masochism, so prominent in Part I, reappears again in this first chapter of the second part. For as he walks along the Nevsk
y Prospect, the underground man experiences “a regular martyrdom, a continual, intolerable humiliation at the thought, which passed into an incessant and direct sensation, that I was a fly in the eyes of this whole world, a nasty, disgusting fly—more intelligent, more cultured, more noble than any of them, of course, but a fly that was continually making way for everyone, insulted and humiliated by everyone. . . . Already then I began to experience a rush of the enjoyment of which I spoke in the first chapter [of the first part]” (5: 130). Once again, however, we must be careful not to take this psychological characterization as self-explanatory. The underground man’s masochism is a part of the dialectic of vanity, and it has a more complex function than merely to illustrate a taste for self-abasement.

  Masochism is assigned much the same function in both parts of the work—just as it had led to suffering in Part II it also acquires a positive significance. The seemingly pathological cultivation of masochistic “enjoyment” by the underground man ultimately buttresses his ego, which refuses to submit docilely to the judgment of the world. Such self-assertion is precisely what enables the underground man, twenty years later, to resist the temptations of a Crystal Palace in which the laws of nature have simply abolished the human personality altogether. Hence, in both parts of the work, Dostoevsky assigns a relative value—the value of protecting the autonomy of the personality—to the ideology of the 1840s, regardless of its weaknesses and shortcomings in other respects.