Notes from Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Indeed, there could hardly be a more thorough denial of artistic unity than this last quoted passage. The naive blithe-ness of its expression is characteristic of Chernyshevsky and thinkers like him (utilitarians, nihilists; then Lenin, Lunachar-sky, the theorists of "socialist realism"). It is defined by Nabokov's narrator in terms of a decomposition of the human person. The metaphor comes quite naturally; the aesthetic question immediately brings with it the human question - or, rather, they are the same.

  As a writer and thinker, Chernyshevsky was the embodiment of what in Russian is called bezdarnost' - giftlessness - and was thus the perfect foil for that minutely observant, wondering, grateful, and form-revealing intelligence that Nabokov celebrates in The Gift. Giftlessness, as Dostoevsky feared and Nabokov knew, became the dominant style in Russia; it eventually seized power, and in the process of "making people happy" destroyed them by millions, leaving its vast motherland broken and desolate. "The triumph of materialism has abolished matter," the poet Andrei Bely said in the famine- ridden 1920s. Godunov-Cherdyntsev gives a more detailed formulation:

  Our overall impression is that materialists of this type fell into a fatal error: neglecting the nature of the thing itself, they kept applying their most materialistic method merely to the relations between objects, to the void between objects and not to the objects themselves; i.e. they were the naivest metaphysicians precisely at that point where they most wanted to be standing on the ground.

  A fatal error, a fatal contradiction. In this respect the greatest foresight was shown by long-eared Shigalyov, the radical theoretician in Dostoevsky's Demons: "I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea I start from. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution to the social formula, there is no other." A direct line leads from metaphysical naivety to murder; a direct line leads from the anti-unity of utilitarian aesthetics to the false unity of the crystal palace. Dostoevsky perceived these relations more clearly than anyone else of his time. The perception coincided with, and in fact constituted, the maturity of his genius. He recognized that his opposition to the "Chernyshev-skians" could not be a struggle for domination, that what was in question was the complex reality of the human being, the whole person, the "thing itself," and that a true articulation of that reality could only come as the final "gift" of an artistic image. Mikhail Bakhtin noted in his study of Dostoevsky's poetics: "Artistic form, correctly understood, does not shape already prepared and found content, but rather permits content to be found and seen for the first time."

  Hence the formal inventiveness of Notes from Underground: its striking language, unlike any literary prose ever written; its multiple and conflicting tonalities; the oddity of its reversed structure, which seems random but all at once reveals its deeper coherence - "chatter… resolved by an unexpected catastrophe," as Dostoevsky described it to his brother. ("All Dostoevsky's novels were written for the sake of the catastrophe," the critic Konstantin Mochulsky observed. "This is the law of the new 'expressive art' that he created. Only upon arriving at the finale do we understand the composition's perfection and the inexhaustible depth of its design.") The catastrophe that resolves Notes from Underground, with its resoundingly symbolic slamming door, is at the same time the moment of its origin. There, in a sudden confusion of tenses, the narrator cries out from the past into the future: "and never, never will I recall this moment with indifference." It is a fleeting moment, but it has determined the narrator's life and gives the edge of passion to his attack, his outburst, after all his years "underground." Coming at the end of the book, it sends us back to the beginning; thus the round of the underground man's ruminations is given form, and this whole "image" Dostoevsky holds up to us as a sign.

  There may, however, have been a more directly opposing idea in the book as Dostoevsky originally wrote it, a sort of ideological climax in Part One to match the narrative climax in Part Two. When the first part appeared in Epoch, Dostoevsky complained in a letter to his brother that the tenth chapter -"the most important one, where the essential thought is expressed" - had been drastically cut by the censors. "Where I mocked at everything and sometimes blasphemed for form's sake - that is let pass; but where from all this I deduced the need of faith and Christ - that is suppressed."

  The published version of the chapter, according to its author, was left "full of self-contradictions." Indeed, the reader will notice that in the third paragraph the "crystal edifice" ceases all at once to represent the ideas of the narrator's opponents and becomes instead something that he himself has possibly invented "as a result of certain old nonrational habits of our generation," something, he says, that "exists in my desires, or, better, exists as long as my desires exist." Obviously there have been major cuts here, removing the transition from one crystal edifice to the other - the word "mansion" being left us as a clue to its nature. We must try to imagine what would have transformed the "chicken coop" into a mansion, what would have made it more than "a phalanstery in a brothel," what would have turned it from an embodiment of the "laws of nature" into a contradiction of those very laws, and how from all this "the need of faith and Christ" was deduced. Dostoevsky never restored the cuts, as he never restored similarly drastic cuts in Crime and Punishment and Demons. Various explanations have been offered for this circumstance, some practical (lack of time, reluctance to confront the censors), others aesthetic (a recognition that the cuts were improvements). We do not know. But if we look at Dostoevsky's outlines of his ideas for novels in his notebooks and letters and then at the novels themselves, we will realize at least that the scheme barely hints at the surprises of its development. However it was that Dostoevsky "deduced the need for faith and Christ" in this chapter, we may be sure that he did not add it on as an external "ideological" precept, but drew it from the materials of the work itself.

  The man from underground refutes his opponents with the results of having carried their own ideas to an extreme in his life. These results are himself. This self, however, as the reader discovers at once, is not a monolithic personality, but an inner plurality in constant motion. The plurality of the person, without any ideological additions, is already a refutation of l'homme de la nature et de la verite, the healthy, undivided man of action who was both the instrument and the object of radical social theory. Unity is not singularity but wholeness, a holding together, a harmony, all of which imply plurality. What the principle of this harmony is, the underground man cannot say; he has never found it. But he knows he has not found it; he knows, because his inner disharmony, his dividedness, which is the source of his suffering, is also the source of consciousness. Here we come upon one of the deep springs of Dostoevsky's later work - not his thinking (Dostoevsky was not a thinker, or, rather, he was a plurality of thinkers), but his artistic embodiment of reality. The one quality his negative characters share, and almost the only negative his world view allows, is inner fixity, a sort of death-in-life, which can take many forms and tonalities, from the broadly comic to the tragic, from the mechanical to the corpselike, from Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin to Nikolai Stavrogin. Inner movement, on the other hand, is always a condition of spiritual good, though it may also be a source of suffering, division, disharmony, in this life. What moves may always rise. Dostoevsky never portrays the completion of this movement; it extends beyond the end of the given book. We see it in characters like Raskolnikov and Mitya Karamazov, but first of all in the man from underground.

  *

  How much the mere tone of Notes from Underground is worth!

  LEV SHESTOV

  The philosopher Shestov, the critic Mochulsky, and most Russian readers agree that the style of Notes from Underground is, in Shestov's words, "very strange." Bakhtin describes it as "deliberately clumsy," though "subject to a certain artistic logic." A detailed discussion of the matter is not possible here, but we can offer a few comments on the style of our translation, pointing to qualities
in the original that we have sought to keep in English for the sake of "mere tone," where they have been lost in earlier translations.

  Though he likes to philosophize, the underground man has no use for philosophical terminology. When he picks up such words, it is to make fun of them; otherwise he couches his thought in the most blunt and even crude terms. An example is his use of the rare word khoteniye, a verbal noun formed from khotet', "to want." It is a simple, elemental word, with an almost physical, appetitive immediacy. The English equivalent is "wanting," which is how we have translated it. The primitive quality of the word appears to have alarmed our predecessors, who translate it as "wishing," "desire," "will," "intention," "choice," "volition," and render it variously at various times. The underground man invariably says "wanting" and "to want." He plays on the different uses of the word ("Who wants to want according to a little table?"); there is one passage running from the end of Chapter VII to the start of Chapter VIII in the first part where "want" and "wanting" appear eighteen times in two paragraphs - the stylistic point of which is blunted when other words are used.

  Another of the underground man's words is vygoda, which means "profit" (gain, benefit), and only secondarily "advan- tage," as it is most often translated. "Profit" has very nearly the same range of uses in English as vygoda has in Russian. It is also a direct, unambiguous word, with an almost tactile quality: you have an advantage, but you get a profit. And like vygoda, with its strongly accented first syllable, "profit" leaps from the mouth almost with the force of an expletive, quite unlike the more unctuous "advantage" or its Russian equivalent preimushchestvo. Again, the narrator insists on his word and plays with it. Thus we arrive at the full music of this underground oratorio:

  And where did all these sages get the idea that man needs some normal, some virtuous wanting? What made them necessarily imagine that what man needs is necessarily a reasonably profitable wanting? Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

  Repetition is of the essence here. When the underground man speaks of consciousness and heightened consciousness, it is always the same word: "consciousness," not "intellectual activity" as one translator has it, not "awareness" as another offers, and never some mixture of the three. The editorial precept of avoiding repetitions, of gracefully varying one's vocabulary, cannot be applied to this writer. His writing is emphatic, heavy-handed, rude: "This is my wanting, this is my desire. You will scrape it out of me only when you change my desires." To translate the scullery verb v yskoblit' ("to scrape out") as "eradicate" or "expunge," as has been done, to exchange the "collar of lard" the narrator bestows on the wretched clerk in Part Two for one that is merely "greasy," is to chasten and thus distort the voice of this man who is nothing but a voice.

  There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Motes from Underground that raises something more than a question of "mere tone." The second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovek, has most often been rendered as "I am a spiteful man." Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for "spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning "wicked," "bad," "evil." The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zlaya ved'ma (zlaya being the feminine of zloy). The opposite of zloy is dobryi, "good," as in "good fairy" (dobraya feya). This opposition is of great importance for Notes from Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at the start to the outburst close to the end: "They won't let me… I can't be… good!" We can talk forever about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, nor is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky. Besides, "wicked" has the lucky gift of picking up the internal rhyme in the first two sentences of the original.

  Richard Pevear

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  mikhail bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985. The classic study of Dostoevsky's formal innovations and the place of his work in the traditions of Menippean satire and carnival humor. Joseph frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation 1860-1863, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 1986. Volume three of Frank's five-volume socio-cultural biography of Dostoevsky, covering the period of composition of Notes from Underground. rene girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Fedor Dostoevsky, translated by James G. Williams, Crossroad, New York, 1997. A translation of Dostoievski, du double a I'unite (Plon, Paris, 1963), especially interesting for its analysis of the erotic/mimetic aspects of Dostoevsky's work. Robert louis jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature, Greenwood Publishers, Westport, CT, 1981. w. j. leatherbarrow, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2002. A collection of essays by various hands dealing with Dostoevsky's works mainly in terms of their cultural context. olga meerson, Dostoevsky's Taboos, Studies of the Harriman Institute, Dresden University Press, Dresden-Munich, 1998. A penetrating study of the metapsychology of tabooing and the meanings of the unsaid in Dostoevsky. konstantin mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, translated by Michael A. Minihan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1967. The work of a distinguished emigre scholar, first published in 1947 and still the best one-volume critical biography of Dostoevsky. Harriet murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1992. Richard peace, Dostoevsky's "Notesfrom Underground": Critical Studies in Russian Literature, Bristol Classical Press, London, 1993. james p. scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2002. lev shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, translated by Bernard Martin and Spencer Roberts, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1967. Essays by one of the major Russian thinkers of the twentieth century. lev shestov, In Job's Balances, translated by Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney, J. M. Dent and Sons, London, 1932. Contains an important essay on Dostoevsky and Notes from Underground - "The Conquest of the Self-Evident." victor terras, Reading Dostoevsky, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1999. A summing up by one of the most important Dostoevsky scholars of our time.

  CHRONOLOGY

  DATE

  AUTHOR'S LIFE

  LITERARY CONTEXT

  1821

  Born in Moscow.

  1823-31

  Pushkin: Evgeny Onegin.

  1825

  1830

  Stendhal: Le Rouge et le Noir.

  1831

  Hugo: Notre Dame de Paris.

  1833-7

  At school in Moscow.

  1834

  Family purchases estate of Darovoe.

  Pushkin: The Queen of Spades. Sand: Jacques.

  1835

  Balzac: Le Pere Goriot.

  1836

  Gogol: The Government Inspector. Chaadaev: Philosophical Letters. Pushkin founds The Contemporary.

  1837

  Death of mother.

  Enters St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering.

  Dickens: Pickwick Papers. Death of Pushkin in duel.

  1839

  Death of father, assumed murdered by serfs.

  Notes of the Fatherland founded by Andrey Kraevsky. Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme.

  1840

  Lermontov: A Hero of Our Time.

  1841

  Death of Lermontov in duel.

  1842

  Gogol: Dead Souls, Part 1, and

  The Overcoat.

  Sue: Les Mysteres de Paris (to

  1843).

  1844

  Graduates, but resigns commission in order to pursue literary career.

  Sue: Le Juif errant (to 1845).

  1845

  Completes Poor Folk
- acclaimed by the critic Belinsky.

  1846

  Publication of Poor Folk and The Double.

  Sand: La Mare au diable.

  1847

  Breaks with Belinsky. Joins Petrashevsky circle. "The Landlady," "A Novel in Nine Letters," "A Petersburg Chronicle".

  Herzen: Who Is to Blame?

  Herzen leaves Russia.

  Goncharov: An Ordinary Story.

  Thackeray: Vanity Fair

  (to 1848).

  Belinsky: Letter to Gogol.

  1848

  "A Faint Heart" and "White Nights."

  Death of Belinsky.

  NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

  DATE