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Introduction Author: Robert Bird Date: 2009 From: Notes from Underground Publisher: Eerdmans Reprint In: Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism(Vol. 238. ) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 6,124 words
Full Text: [(essay date 2009) In the following essay, Bird provides biographical and historical context to provide insights into Dostoevsky's literary and philosophical intentions in the writing and publishing of Notes from Underground.]
Upon his return to St. Petersburg at the end of 1859, thirty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky threw himself into public life with an impatience fueled by ten years of remote isolation. After being convicted of participating in a seditious conspiracy in December 1849, he had spent four years in an Omsk prison-camp and then almost six more in compulsory military service in Semipalatinsk (now Semei, Kazakhstan). Long before his arrival in the capital, Dostoevsky had feverishly begun to follow intellectual news and to correspond with leading literary figures, including his former co-conspirator, Aleksei Pleshcheev, and future rival Ivan Turgenev. He had also started publishing eagerly anticipated new works--namely, the story "Uncle's Dream" and the novel The Village Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants--which hearkened back to the styles and concerns of the 1840s. Despite the goodwill shown to their author upon his return from the ranks of the living dead, the cool critical reception of these first new works showed that Dostoevsky had much catching up to do. Upon reaching St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky set out to meet old friends and new literary stars alike, including Turgenev, poet Iakov Polonsky, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Two volumes of his collected works were published in Moscow at the start of 1860. Though still banned from occupying such posts officially, Dostoevsky also became de facto co-editor of his brother Mikhail's intellectual review Vremia (Time), which began appearing as a monthly in January 1861. Within a year he was well on his way to reclaiming the all-too-brief fame he had enjoyed prior to his arrest in April 1849.
In addition to his purely literary ambitions, however, Dostoevsky was also driven by a higher purpose, acquired during his time in the prison camp, where he had owned only a single book: the Gospels. Though he had never been hostile to religion, he now seemed intent on remaking his art in the light of his renewed beliefs, not just in its subject matter but also in its very shape. Instead of simply resuming his original career path, Dostoevsky would allow his unplanned detour to Siberia to lead him in a wholly new direction. Instead of becoming a writer in the literary establishment, he would undertake to redefine literature as such. The crucial decision was to cease projecting ideas onto fictional forms and to allow both form and idea to emerge viscerally from his raw experience. Ceding a degree of control over his own imagination, Dostoevsky entered into a kind of wager on form, trusting that it would overcome the unsightliness of his times and milieux.
Even as he left Siberia, he began planning a new work, Notes from the Dead House, in an utterly original style. He described it in a letter he wrote to his brother on 9 October 1859:
My personality will disappear. They are the notes of an unknown man; but I guarantee they will be interesting. There will be the most capital interest. They will be serious, gloomy, humorous, and colloquial conversation in the prison style [...] and the representation of people about whom literature has never even heard; they will be touching and, finally, most importantly, they will bear my name.1
Notes from the Dead House is justly regarded as the first great work in the Russian literature of captivity after Archpriest Avvakum's autobiography from the 1670s. Like Avvakum in his Life and like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "experiment in literary investigation," The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Dostoevsky found himself obliged to invent a new literary form for a world that refused to submit to conventional means of literary representation. Instead of an authoritative narrator, Dostoevsky entrusted the work to the eccentric Aleksandr Petrovich Gorianchikov, a former inmate whose "notes" have allegedly been recovered and published by an unnamed editor. Instead of following a linear structure, Gorianchikov's Notes document stories he overhears from his fellow inmates and then provide a thematic analysis of life in the Siberian prison camp. Throughout the work, the reader is reminded of the impossibility of conveying even a fraction of the visceral experience in conventional literary form. At the same time that he was reinstating his name in the media culture of his day, Dostoevsky was undertaking its fundamental analysis and critique.
Along with his vibrant, even racy language (which Boris Jakim has captured in his new translation), Dostoevsky's visceral experimentalism is a major reason why, almost a hundred and fifty years later, the texts he produced from 1860 to his death in 1881
retain such freshness and energy. Of course, despite the obvious differences, the overall contours of our ideological and cultural world have remained remarkably stable over this time. Just as Nietzsche seems far closer to us than to Hegel, so also Dostoevsky anticipated our concerns and, in crucial respects, has continued to shape our attitudes more than many of his greatest contemporaries. As with Nietzsche, the intricate and provocative form of Dostoevsky's texts has thus far resisted domestication in our media-saturated world. Though classic in the permanency of the claims they make on readers, Dostoevsky's works help each new generation of readers to discover their own opaque undergrounds and invisible skyways.
Written "deep in the shadow of the dead house,"2 Notes from Underground was another wager on form. As the specific ideological context has receded from view and mass-media culture has become ever more pervasive, the formal provocation of Notes from Underground has increasingly become the site of contention. In addition to appreciating its biographical and ideological contexts, it is important to understand why Notes from Underground took the form that it did and how this form continues to affect our reading of it.
Ideology and Fiction
The year 1860 was an auspicious moment for Dostoevsky to join the journalistic fray. Since the death of Nicholas I in 1855, Alexander II had led Russia on a long-overdue series of reforms, resulting in the emancipation of the peasantry from serfdom on 19 February 1861. Part of the reform process was the gradual loosening of restrictions on education and the media known as glasnost', which released much pent-up creative energy and quickly ushered in the major elements of a civil society. Alongside his fictional works, Dostoevsky continually worked on the journal Vremia, both as author and as editor. Most notably, after traveling in Western Europe from 7 June to 23 August 1862, Dostoevsky wrote his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, his most sustained piece of social commentary from the 1860s, which amounted to a thorough and impassioned attack on the foundations of modern society as exemplified by Britain, France, and Germany.
Meanwhile, writing from the prison cell he had occupied since July 1862, Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) was publishing his subversive novel What Is to Be Done? in the rival journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary). This was a major oversight on the part of the censors, because What Is to Be Done? was written and read as a transparent program for the radical reformation of Russian society under the leadership of heroic individuals of iron will. The views that brought Chernyshevsky to this vision were close to utilitarianism, meaning that actions should be judged in terms of their expediency. Naturally, utilitarians assumed that we can know the standard against which expediency can be measured; usually it was economic well-being. In Chernyshevsky's rational egotism, utilitarianism as a method coincided with socialism as a goal: in essence, it is in everyone's individual self-interest that the whole of society flourish. Chernyshevsky's novel implied revolutionary action as a means of establishing this self-evident truth.
Appearing at the same time, Dostoevsky's Winter Notes share major concerns with Chernyshevsky's novel, albeit viewed from the opposite end of the political spectrum. Both works feature the image of the Crystal Palace, a vast iron-and-glass structure created in London for the 1851 World's Fair and left standing for twenty-five years afterwards as a museum of--and monument to--the aspirations and power of modernity. In Chernyshevsky's work, the Crystal Palace appears in the heroine Vera Pavlovna's "fourth dream" as the home for inhabitants of a future paradise of joyful labor and abundant, equal rewards; both the natural landscape and the social structure have been transformed after everyone suddenly realized that they should strive for "what is useful": "It is only necessary to be cautious, to be able to organize well and to learn how to use resources to the greatest advantage," explains Vera Pavlovna's Vergil. Dostoevsky's response to the Crystal Palace was quite different. He saw it not as a prototype for thoroughly rational society but as a delusion of human grandeur that merely accentuated the contrast between human aspiration toward an ideal and the sordid street life of the modern city:
It is a kind of biblical scene, something about Babylon, a kind of prophecy from the Apocalypse fulfilled before your very eyes. You feel that it would require a great deal of eternal spiritual resistance and denial not to succumb, not to surrender to the impression, not to bow down to fact, and not to idolize Baal, that is, not to accept what exists as your ideal. ...3
For Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky's novel was not merely a mistaken ideology; it signaled a failure to hold society to the highest moral standard--that of Christianity--and therefore a fatal compromise with conscience.
In crucial respects, Notes from Underground represents the culmination of the ideological duel between Dostoevsky and Chernyshevsky. For one thing, it features the image of the Crystal Palace, which the Underground Man assails as a prison-house of the human will. In the Underground Man's thorough critique of Chernyshevsky's utilitarianism, one senses Dostoevsky's own outrage at the replacement of morality with a form of economic calculation, which for him was an offensively reductive concept of reason. Most of all, though, the Underground Man appeals against the enthronement of economic well-being as the measure of human action, famously saying that the idea of profit ignores the "maximally profitable profit"--free will. Noting that the second part of Notes from Underground, "Apropos of the Wet Snow," is set in the mid-1840s, around the time of Dostoevsky's literary debut with the sentimental epistolary novel Poor Folk, Joseph Frank has suggested that "the novella is above all a diptych depicting two episodes of a symbolic history of the Russian intelligentsia."4 Breaking with the radicals of the 1860s, Dostoevsky was also signaling a break with his own past and declaring spiritual values above and beyond any practical measure.
No less important was Dostoevsky's rejection of Chernyshevsky's utilitarian aesthetics. In the introduction to What Is to Be Done? Chernyshevsky confessed, "I lack even a shade of artistic talent. I don't even have a good grasp of the language. But that's not important: read on, o kind public! Your reading of this book will not be devoid of utility. Truth is a good thing; it compensates for the failings of the writer who serves it."5 Dostoevsky could not separate truth from form in this manner, and never could he view a narrative as a vessel of ideas, obliquely stated. On the contrary, the ideological debates of the 1860s formed no more than material in which Dostoevsky was minting an image of much greater lasting power. Chernyshevsky characterized his task as the formation of a new public: "If you were the public," Chernyshevsky explained to his knowing readers, "I would no longer need to write. If you didn't exist, I couldn't write. But though you are not yet the public, you already exist among the public, so I must still and can already write." Chernyshevsky addressed his work to a new collective, one that eventually would take power in Russia, and one on which he
depended to justify his work. Dostoevsky, by contrast, used the public sphere to speak directly to individuals in a work that was its own provocation and justification. Relinquishing the comfort of conventional form and medium, Dostoevsky placed a wager on the power of literature to enable moral and spiritual agency.
The Form of the Underground
Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground over a period of several months, from the end of 1863 to early 1864. This was a tumultuous time in Dostoevsky's life. His wife, Maria Dmitrievna, lay dying of tuberculosis. Moreover, Vremia had suddenly been banned in May 1863 because of an article in the April 1863 issue concerning the Polish uprising, and the brothers Dostoevsky were frantically trying to get out its successor, called Epokha (Epoch). Dostoevsky felt that Notes from Underground (originally consisting of three parts) should be published all at once, but he rushed to get the first part ("The Underground") into the inaugural issue of Epokha (March-April 1864) and was forced to leave the rest for later. An editorial note signed by Mikhail Dostoevsky reads, "The continuation of F. M. Dostoevsky's tale Notes from Underground has been postponed until the next issue because of the author's illness" (28-2: 405). The continuation was not ready for May, however, and part two (originally entitled "A Tale Apropos of the Wet Snow") was published only in the June issue of 1864.
The delay was exacerbated by the censor's intervention in the first part of the Notes (especially, it would seem, what is now its tenth section). After perusing the journal, Dostoevsky wrote, furious, to his brother:
The misprints are terrible and it would have been better not to print the penultimate chapter at all (the main one, where the very idea is enunciated) than to print it as it is, with forced phrases and contradicting itself. What can you do! The censors are pigs; wherever I ridiculed everything and at times blasphemed for show--that was let by, but where I derived from this the need for faith and Christ--this was prohibited. Are they, the censors, in a plot against the government or something?(28-2: 73)
Since the manuscript has not survived, we can only guess what exactly the censor excised and how accurately Dostoevsky characterized its significance; he was not immune to exaggeration. Be that as it may, he began the second part, "Apropos of the Wet Snow," with the knowledge that the positive elements of the Underground Man's rant had been lost, and one can thus surmise that the narrative was written in part to compensate for the excisions and provide the lacking "need for faith and Christ." Dostoevsky's inability to spell things out explicitly forced him to wager on the reader's ability to construct a finished image out of disparate elements. To a large degree, any critical reading of Notes from Underground rests on how one reconciles the two parts of the work.
The story of the work shows that it would be wrong to view it merely as a defense of free will and a rejoinder to Chernyshevsky. This was a frequent mistake in the twentieth century, made by existentialists and cold warriors alike, who sometimes published the first part of Notes from Underground without the longer second part as a bold defense of free will. The editor's note accompanying the first publication contained an additional sentence that urged readers to regard the "first fragment" as "an introduction to the entire book, almost a preface" (5: 342). In letters to his brother, Dostoevsky expressly argued against publishing the parts of the work separately from each other, fearing that this would upset the intricate linkages between them, which he likened to "transitions" in music: "The first chapter appears to be chatter, but suddenly in the last two chapters this chatter is resolved in an unexpected catastrophe," he wrote to Mikhail on 13 April 1864. Further light is shed on the nature of this catastrophic resolution by another of Dostoevsky's intriguing comments to his brother concerning his work on the "tale": "In tone it is too strange, and the tone is shrill and wild; some people might not like it. Therefore it is necessary that poetry soften and salvage [vynesla] everything" (28-2: 70). We are left, then, with the question of where to seek the "poetry" of part two and how it proves "the need for faith and Christ." One answer lies in another episode of Dostoevsky's tumultuous biography.
The Wager and the Wet Snow
At the beginning of August 1863--after publishing Winter Notes on Summer Impressions in February and March, and before beginning Notes from Underground--Dostoevsky set off on another long trip to Western Europe, where he met up with his lover, the twenty-three-year-old Apollinaria Suslova. Though he claimed the trip was intended to treat his epilepsy, which had first afflicted him in prison in 1850, Dostoevsky also spent a lot of time in casinos, frittering away sorely needed money, much of it borrowed. Left behind in Petersburg were Dostoevsky's terminally ill wife and his wayward stepson, Pavel Isaev, both of whom could have used his support. Also in need of his support was his brother, who was reeling from the prohibition of Vremia at the end of May. Dostoevsky kept an eye on all this as best he could, but the stress undermined any benefit he derived for his health.
Dostoevsky's actions represent a continual assertion of freedom against the combined forces of necessity, whether financial, social, or moral. Whether or not his epilepsy heightened his sensitivity to financial and erotic risk-taking, he always seemed ready and even eager to lodge a wager on the freedom of the future against the constraints of the present. Not that this faith in providence was ever borne out materially. As Joseph Frank has pointed out, through his gambling Dostoevsky "was paradoxically affirming his acceptance of the proper order of the universe as he conceived of it, and learning the same lesson as the underground man and all of his great negative heroes beginning with Raskolnikov, who deludedly believe they can master and suppress the irrational promptings of Christian conscience."6 Dostoevsky's experiences in the summer of 1863 eventually resulted in his novella The Gambler (1866), but before that, they shaped the personality of the Underground Man, whose loss of faith in higher realities causes him constantly to hedge petty wagers with ever-diminishing returns. The issue was not to suppress the passion for wagers by limiting desire even more stringently to the bounds of scientific or dogmatic reason, but rather to redeem desire by raising the stakes of its wagers to the absolute limit, beyond what is commonly held to be rational or even possible.
But how can the Underground Man's petty hedges yield these absolute winnings? The diatribe in the first part of the novella has tended to overpower the hesitant resolution provided in the sequel. In one of the very few contemporary responses, the radical writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin provided a parody of the Notes: "The stage is neither dark nor light, but of some greyish hue; living voices are not audible, only a hissing, and living images are not visible, but it is as if bats are crossing through the twilight air. It is not a
fantastic world but not a living one either, rather it is as if made of jelly" (5: 382). Responding to rumors about Dostoevsky's "scandalous story," even Apollinaria Suslova expressed concern that Dostoevsky was becoming "cynical" (5: 379). It must have pained him to hear this--one of very few responses to the work that reached him--since he had put so much effort into the narrative refutation of the Underground Man's rant.
But then, the refutation of the Underground Man by the prostitute Liza is not an argument at all; she is not empowered to speak for herself in the work. Rather, the refutation emerges from her silence. Like some of Dostoevsky's later heroines, most notably the titular character of "The Gentle Creature" (1876), Liza remains a mute image hung over the narrative, testifying to the possibility of redemption beyond speech. The crucial move here is that, though the Underground Man might presently be in a prison of his own construction, the investigation of his past reveals moments of lost potentiality, most notably when Liza extends her love. The work moves from the cold, hard facts of social condition to the possibility of spiritual causation. Liza's love is a pledge that he might still be able to redeem, though this would require a wager that he finds impossible: a wager on the other.
Like so many of the experiences he related in his fiction, this was something Dostoevsky knew from personal experience. As he finished Notes from Underground, he was close to despair. His beloved brother died on 10 July 1864, endangering Epokha and leaving Dostoevsky saddled with debts for the rest of his life. A few months earlier, on 16 April 1864, he witnessed the death of his wife. He wrote to a friend that she "had loved me boundlessly, and I loved her also without measure, but we did not live happily together" (28-2: 116). Her death led Dostoevsky to record some of his loftiest words about human potential:
Maria is lying on the table. Will I ever see Maria?To love another man as oneself, according to Christ's testament, is impossible. The law of the personality binds us on earth. The I gets in the way. Only Christ could, but Christ was the ideal eternal from the ages, to which man strives and should strive, according to the law of nature. At the same time, after the appearance of Christ as an ideal of man in the flesh it has become as clear as day that the highest, final development of the person is precisely [...] so that man found, realized, and believed with all the power of his nature that the highest use he can make of his person ... is, as it were, to destroy this I and give it to all and to any without separation and without regret. [...] So, on earth man strives for an ideal opposite to his nature. Whenever man has failed to fulfill the law of striving for the ideal, that is, when he has not sacrificed in love his I to people or another being (Maria and I), he feels suffering and has named this state "sin." Thus, man should incessantly feel suffering, which is balanced by the heavenly pleasure of fulfilling the law, that is, by sacrifice. This is earthly balance. Otherwise the earth would be meaningless.(20: 172-75)
In the face of such personal trauma, one might expect Dostoevsky to have behaved with more caution, but Notes from Underground shows how, out of the depths of dire necessity, he bet on a response of love.
The Ethics of Media
Dostoevsky's immersion in the mainstream media of his day was somewhat ironic, given the price he had paid for his previous involvement in illicit networks of textual production, dissemination, and performance. His arrest on 23 April 1849 had been instigated by his reading of correspondence between Nikolai Gogol and Vissarion Belinsky, in which the young critic had excoriated the older writer for his declarations of fidelity to the Orthodox Church, which Belinsky associated with the repressive autocracy. In the course of long interrogations, Dostoevsky insisted that he read the incriminating letters out of pure interest, having been an acolyte of Gogol and a protégé of Belinsky, and that "he did not agree with a single one of the exaggerations found in this article" (18: 180). However during their search of Dostoevsky's flat, the police also confiscated two banned books, a socialist tract by Eugène Sue and a critique of religion by P. J. Proudhon, thereby confirming their suspicion that Dostoevsky was trafficking in sedition. It was for these crimes that on 22 December 1849 Dostoevsky received a death sentence that at the last minute was commuted by the emperor to four years in prison and six more in exile as a soldier. It was a good thing for Dostoevsky that the authorities never learned of his involvement in a more serious plot to establish an illicit printing press.
In the fictional works he wrote after returning to St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky constantly highlighted the various networks of textual transmission and circulation. Prior to committing murder, Raskolnikov calls attention to himself by publishing a newspaper article.7
The world of Demons is awash in illicit and inflammatory texts, both smuggled into Russia from abroad and printed domestically on underground presses, including Stavrogin's scandalous confession. Ivan Karamazov is the author of published and unpublished theological texts. As these examples show, within the dense media sphere of Dostoevsky's novels, the official press tends to produce more noise than understanding.
Upon close analysis, one notes that the Underground Man is constantly speaking in words borrowed from the contemporary media. The ideals against which he measures himself, and against which he then rebels, are imposed from without. He imagines how various scenarios will play out, only to realize that they are derivative of popular literary works. Only in his memory of Liza can he hear someone speaking to him as an individual, and only in response to her can he imagine himself saying something sincere, though his over-reflective consciousness prevents him from actually doing so. Only in such a private encounter could he reconcile himself to an open future, as opposed to the neat images of success that confront him at every turn in the public sphere. However, in the totalizing media world, even this private encounter is tainted by the Underground Man's consciousness of its possible literary models and by his constant sense of shame, as if he is perpetually being scrutinized by an audience; therefore, he feigns haughty indifference and self-reliance. His final gesture shows him decisively choosing his projected, finalized identity over the more difficult restoral of emotional immediacy. As Gary Saul Morson has remarked, "Closure and structure mark the difference between life as it is lived and as it is read about; and real people live without the benefit of an outside perspective on which both closure and structure depend."8 The wall against which the Underground Man flails consists of words and images which can never be his own.
Notes from Underground powerfully affirms the unrealized potentialities within media culture and its ability to allow unsightly reality to form itself into an image. In Part One we see the Underground Man railing against a conventional wisdom derived from newspapers and journals, but instead of simply explaining his current state, the narrative of Part Two also reveals points at which another kind of connection was possible between the Underground Man and others, especially Liza. Freedom from the necessity of
the present may lie in the future, but only through the mediation of the past. The Underground Man's autobiographical notes reveal a potential for being loved, and therefore, perhaps, for loving another, though his inability to bring the story to a close prevents the notes from reaching any listeners who might hear him. The editor's decision to end the text at Liza's departure, though the story goes on incessantly, marks a point where the text recedes before the enormity of a life, which can only be suggested, never captured, on the page.
Dostoevsky's Notes
Dostoevsky's works of the early 1860s represent his first attempts not only to escape the logic of the modern media but also to create a Christian literature. As Dostoevsky's works make abundantly clear, this did not necessarily mean a literature about Christianity or even about Christians. Working out what it did mean brought Dostoevsky face-to-face with a fundamental question: How can art communicate ideas through form? His answer was that Christianity revealed nothing other than a new concept of image, and that therefore art is Christian above all not in its ideas, but in the kind of image it projects.
Dostoevsky's view of the sovereign power of art had deep roots in his earlier career. In the course of his interrogations when he was under arrest in 1849, Dostoevsky presented an impassioned defense of the need for writers to enjoy freedom in their art. "Society cannot exist without literature," he said, insofar as literature serves as "the mirror of society" (18: 126). He insisted that he did not mean the freedom to utter seditious ideas, but rather the purely artistic freedom to choose subject and style; this was the freedom of imagination, not the freedom of speech. His standpoint here brought him into conflict both with the censors (who suspected criminal intent in any satire or tragedy) and with radical critics like Belinsky, whom Dostoevsky described as "[trying] to give literature a limited and undignified role, reducing it to the mere description, so to speak, of purely newspaper facts and scandalous events" (18: 127). In short, Dostoevsky remarked, "literature needs no tendency; art is a goal in itself; the artist should simply concern himself with artistry and the idea will come of its own accord, for it is a necessary condition of artistry" (18: 128-29).
One influential view has focused on Dostoevsky's use of the term image (obraz) as a counterpoint to the unsight (bezobrazie) he observed in modern life.9 But how would Dostoevsky's image differ from a purely imaginary and therefore innocuous construct like the utopia of Vera Pavlovna's fourth dream in Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? After his arrest in 1849 as part of a group linked to Mikhail Petrashevsky, a follower of French utopian Charles Fourier, Dostoevsky remarked, "As far as we--Russia, Petersburg--are concerned, it's enough to walk twenty paces along the street to become convinced that on our soil Fourierism can exist only in the uncut pages of a book or in a soft, gentle, and dreamy soul, but in no other form than that of an idyll or a verse poem in twenty-four cantos" (18: 133). Such images eviscerate the reality they describe; they characterize the media which comprise the Underground Man's world and which prove helpless against his destructive cynicism. It is difficult to identify any hardier image that might counteract the unsightliness of the Underground Man. Even Liza is disfigured by her sordid surroundings.
Clarification can be had if we take a closer look at the genre of Notes from Underground. Along with Notes from the Dead House and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, it is one of three works by Dostoevsky from this period that exhibit the tension between eternal questions and topical crises. The three works are united by the use of a first-person narrator who struggles to make sense of the chaotic life that surrounds him without eviscerating it. A defining feature of these "notes" is their narrator's mimicry of dominant ideological standpoints. (Dostoevsky himself was an accomplished impersonator and enthusiastic participant in amateur theatricals.) To a large degree, these three sets of "notes" are more of a visceral record of social disfiguration than an attempt to impose or even reveal an image.
Dostoevsky's genre of "notes" is analogous to his account of genre painting in an 1873 essay titled "At the Exhibition," which was published in his Diary of a Writer. Here he reiterates his long-standing rejection of tendentiousness in art, lamenting that because of the call for social relevance, "a young poet resists his natural need to pour forth in his own images [...] and forces himself painfully to produce a topic that satisfies the general, uniform, liberal and social opinion" (21: 73). Addressing the tradition typified by the radical critics Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov, Dostoevsky continues, "'One must represent reality as it is,' they say; meanwhile, there is no such reality and there never has been on earth, because the essence of things is inaccessible to man, and he perceives nature as it is reflected in his idea and filtered through his feelings" (21: 75). Dostoevsky begins by distinguishing the problem of representation in various artistic genres, each of which treats the relationship between image and idea differently. The portraitist, for instance, must capture the moment when the subject is most like himself. The historical painter, by contrast, must capture the original moment and its future potentiality, which explains why this moment has deserved commemoration. But how does the genre painter capture the idea and the as-yet-unrealized potential of the present moment? This is precisely Dostoevsky's problem in Notes: to provide a visceral image of a reality that is disfigured, unsightly, and inchoate. This is especially true of the first part; as a historical narrative, the second part also manifests alternative potentialities, but to be realized, these potentialities would require someone--the Underground Man, his editor, or (most likely) his readers--to take the absolute risk of faith.
In his "editor's note" to Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky claims that the Underground Man is a necessary fiction. "Such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but even must, exist in our society," he writes, but only as "one of the representatives of a generation now coming to an end." The Underground Man represents an unproductive present that bears within itself all the inevitability of the past. An analogous formulation appears in the note "From the Author" to The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoevsky calls Alyosha an "odd man" who nonetheless "carries within himself the heart of the whole" (14: 5). Alyosha represents a present that is open to the future and bears within it all the unrealized potentialities of the past. These two prefaces describe the progress of Dostoevsky's imagination during the last twenty years of his life, from the Underground Man to the new saint, from the tyrannous present to the as-yet-free future, and from the compulsive author to the responsive reader. This hard-fought progress was Dostoevsky's ultimate wager.
Notes
1. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-1990), vol. 28-1, p. 349. Further citations of this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.
2. Robert Louis Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 170.
3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. David Patterson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
4. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 316.
5. Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Chto delat'? Iz rasskazov o novykh liudiakh (Leningrad, 1975), p. 14. The best edition in English is Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, translated by Michael R. Katz, annotated by William G. Wagner (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989); these passages occur on pp. 48-49.
6. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865, p. 263.
7. On the media sources of Dostoevsky's novels, see Konstantine Klioutchkine, "The Rise of Crime and Punishment from the Air of the Media," Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 88-108; and Anne Lounsbery, "Print Culture and Real Life in Dostoevskii's Demons," Dostoevsky Studies, n.s., 11 (2007): 25-37.
8. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 38.
9. See Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky; see also Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art, 2d ed. (Bloomington, Ind.: Physsardt Publishers, 1978).
Suggestions for Further Reading
Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Translated and edited by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. This is a fascinating and influential study of Dostoevsky's fiction as an innovative form of ideological discourse.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky. What Is to Be Done? Translated by Michael R. Katz; annotated by William G. Wagner. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground. 2d edition. Translated and edited by Michael Katz. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001. This Norton Critical Edition includes enlightening background sources and critical responses.
Fyodor Dostoevsky. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Translated by David Patterson. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. This volume is the third part of Frank's magisterial biography of the writer.
René Girard. Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. Edited and translated by James G. Williams. New York: Crossroad, 1997. Girard takes the "underground" as a starting point for a wide-ranging reflection on Dostoevsky's work.
Robert Louis Jackson. The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Jackson's close readings of individual works, including Notes from Underground, are unparalleled in their sensitivity and insight.
Gary Saul Morson. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. This is a philosophical meditation on narrative that features, inter alia, analyses of Notes from Underground.
James P. Scanlan. Dostoevsky the Thinker. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002. Scanlan's volume offers the most complete and authoritative account of Dostoevsky's interest in and relevance for specific philosophical problems.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Bird, Robert. "Introduction." Translated by Boris Jakim. Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Kathy D. Darrow, vol. 238,
Gale, 2011. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420105020/LitRC?u=mill30389&sid=bookmark- LitRC&xid=953a91f1. Accessed 11 July 2021. Originally published in Notes from Underground, Eerdmans, 2009, pp. vii-xxiv.
Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420105020