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Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground Author: Victor Terras Date: 2005 From: Dostoevsky's Polyphonic Talent Publisher: University Press of America Reprint In: Short Story Criticism(Vol. 134. ) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 4,401 words

Full Text: [(essay date 1988) In the following essay, first presented as a paper in 1988, Terras discusses Notes from the Underground as a confessional work, a psychological study, a "declaration of atheist existentialism," and a sharp satire aimed at Dostoevsky's ideological opponents and their philosophy.]

Dostoevsky's short novel Notes from Underground1, which met with a rather indifferent reception when it first appeared in Epoch, the Dostoevsky brothers' journal, in 1864, has been considered one of his most important works since Vasily Rozanov drew attention to it in the 1890s. Dostoevsky himself must have considered it significant since he used the word podpol'e, "underground," generically in his later writings, giving it the meaning of an existence alienated from life and its healthy concerns. Notes from Underground was written at a time when Dostoevsky's fortunes were once more at a low ebb. His wife was dying, he was engaged in an unhappy love affair with Apollinaria Suslova, a young writer of difficult character, Epoch was floundering, and his financial condition was deteriorating. Ten years later, he would say that this work was too gloomy and took a position that he had later overcome. A letter of Fyodor's to his brother and co-editor of Epoch, Mikhail Dostoevsky, suggests that the censors had removed from the text some passages in which Dostoevsky had refuted his anti-hero's nihilism:

"I also have complaints concerning my own piece. There are terrible misprints in it, and it really would have been better not to publish the next-to-last chapter at all (the most important chapter, in which the main idea is expressed) than to publish it as is, i. e., with sentences chopped out, which distorts the meaning. But what can be done! The censors are a bunch of pigs--those places where I mocked everything and occasionally employed blasphemy for the sake of form they allowed to stand; but when, from all that, I deduced the need for faith and for Christ, they took it out. What are the censors doing? Are they part of a conspiracy against the government, or what?"2

The immediate question is whether Notes from Underground is a "confession," a psychological study in neurotic behavior, a philosophical tract, or a social satire. It is all of these things, but some qualifications are immediately in order. While the work has the form of a "confession," a popular literary genre, it is not a personal confession. The anti-hero3 is Dostoevsky only to the extent any product of a writer's imagination is. Dostoevsky will rarely do a "psychological study" for the sake of psychology. Here as elsewhere, the psychological portrait stands for a social type, as Dostoevsky makes explicit on the last page of the work. Dostoevsky once said that he was "schwach [weak] in philosophy, but not in his love of philosophy." The philosophical argument in Notes from Underground is existential, rather than academic or doctrinal. Dostoevsky's opponents, liberals and radicals alike noted the satire.

Dostoevsky's lifelong political adversary Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), a leader of the radical intelligentsia, responded with some vitriolic remarks, suggesting that Dostoevsky's arguments were taken from St. Thomas Aquinas without giving proper credit to the angelic doctor. A perceptive critic, Saltykov-Shchedrin understood that it was the purpose of Notes from Underground to "set up" the Russian intellectual for a conversion to religion by eliminating every other path to a meaningful existence.

Indeed, in its most obvious sense, Notes from Underground is a mordant satire aimed at the positions of Dostoevsky's ideological opponents with whom he had been carrying on a spirited polemic on the pages of his journals Time and Epoch since 1861. The main target of the anti-hero's direct attack is the "anthropological principle" of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), who in 1863 had published the immensely successful What Is to Be Done?, a fictionalized program of the radical Left. Chernyshevsky's doctrine stated that man, while an egoist by nature, was also possessed of reason and a natural inclination to cooperate with other humans, which allowed him to pursue his self-interest rationally and in collaboration with others. Chernyshevsky also believed that to be engaged in useful labor was a natural condition desired by all normal and healthy humans. The ills of society, he believed, were a result of departure from these natural principles, and also that they could be cured by education and the promotion of a scientific worldview that would cause men to recognize their errors and lead them to a natural, healthy, and happy way of life.

A materialist monist, Chernyshevsky believed that mental processes were subject to the same laws as physical processes and that

these laws were known at least in essence, making human behavior as determinate, at least in principle, as the phenomena of physical nature. Chernyshevsky's crude materialism, positivism, and scientism were coupled with a fervent idealism that inspired him and his followers in the promotion of these principles.

Dostoevsky's anti-hero challenges Chernyshevsky head-on, declaring that his view of human nature is simply wrong, that men often act consciously against their rational self-interest, that the progress of science and civilization by no means guarantees a kinder and happier humanity, and that "all man actually needs is independent will, at all costs and whatever the consequences." He is confident that man will resist any attempt to make him a "piano key" or "organ stop" and suspects that mankind will go on pursuing the irrational dream of a "crystal palace" even if it were proven impossible in terms of the laws of nature. Perhaps most important of all, he suggests that Chernyshevsky's image of man is naively simplistic. It barely describes the surface of the human mind, and an idealized abstraction of it at that. In reality, man is infinitely deeper and more complex:

"What I mean is that there are things in every man's past that he won't admit except to his most intimate friends. There are other things that he won't admit even to his friends but only to himself--and only in strictest confidence. But there are things, too, that a man won't dare to admit even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things. In fact, the more decent he is the greater accumulation he's bound to have."(122)4

Chernyshevsky's anthropological principle was based on the ethic rationalism of the Enlightenment, Rousseau, and contemporary positivist and pragmatist thought, all of which assumed that the human condition could be improved by rational measures, and in particular that a more rational social order would produce more rational and therefore happier human beings. Dostoevsky lets his anti-hero demonstrate the absurdity of this line of reasoning to clear the way for an alternative: irrational religious faith, arrived at through intuition, illumination, and the grace of God.

Dostoevsky's anti-hero has nothing but scorn and ridicule for Chernyshevsky and his anthropological principle. He parodies the style of Chernyshevsky's logical arguments to come up with confusing antinomies instead of enlightened truths. The whole background and life-style of the anti-hero are such that one would expect to see him in the radical camp. The episode with the prostitute Liza is a nasty "dig" at the Russian radicals, some of whom attempted to rehabilitate prostitutes, usually with predictably negative results. There is such an episode in Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and Nikolai Dobrolyubov (1836-1861), Chernyshevsky's close friend and colleague on the staff of The Contemporary, had tried it himself.

The satire in Notes from Underground has another, less obvious target, the solipsist individualism of the Left-Hegelian anarchist Max Stirner (1806-1856), whose book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own, 1845) was well known in Russia. The anti-hero makes a valiant effort to live up to Stirner's ideal of a self-sufficient and self-reliant individualist who--echoes of the subjective idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)--creates his own world to live in. The anti-hero's world is in fact a creation of his remarkable, though undisciplined and unpleasant, imagination. He succeeds in defending his autonomy against all invaders, the most dangerous of whom is Liza. The point is that it is a wretched, ugly, and petty world: the episode of the "duel" with the lieutenant who had unceremoniously "picked him up and set him down a bit further away" like a piece of furniture, when he was blocking his way in a pool hall (129), shows how ludicrous this world is. However, the episode did place strictly in the anti-hero's mind, for the lieutenant was utterly unaware of it: the anti-hero had succeeded in converting this brush with real life into cerebral play, a part of his own private world. The episode with Liza shows at what moral cost the anti-hero's independence is bought. Altogether, the black comedy of the anti-hero's existence--his relationship with his servant Apollon is another salient example--is not to be overlooked.

Notes from Underground is better understood if seen in context with some other works by Dostoevsky. His early story "White Nights" (1848) features a lonely young recluse who spends his time pleasantly enough dreaming of love, adventure, and success, until he has a brush with real life and real love. The episode ends in disappointment. The romantic dreamer sees nothing but "a sad and barren future flash before himself" and himself, "fifteen years later, having aged in this very room, just as lonely" (61). "White Nights" is important as a step toward Notes from Underground, since the latter work suggests repeatedly that the anti-hero was a romantic in his youth. In fact, the Russian romantic is a butt of his satirical jibes. The young dreamer of "White Nights" is a most attractive, even charming figure. His metamorphosis into the nasty and spiteful hero of Notes from Underground pushes the problem of an "underground" existence toward a forcible solution. The hero of Dostoevsky's next novel, Crime and Punishment (1866-1867) also leads an "underground" existence. He breaks out of it, though at the cost of becoming a murderer. An explicit resolution of the "underground" theme is given in Dostoevsky's short story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877), whose hero, another lonely recluse, experiences an epiphany that causes him to embrace and preach Christ's commandment to love others as yourself--and to look up the little beggar girl he had chased away before he had his illumination.

Dostoevsky insisted that his anti-hero was not an isolated case but a "type." Who is he, then? He is a godless Russian intellectual, a "nihilist" of the 1860s, at the end of his rope, facing the inevitable existential consequences of his philosophy. The anti-hero is intelligent. He burns off veritable fireworks of witticisms and paradoxes, but his is a negative, corrosive, self-destructive intelligence that leads to nihilism. He is well read, but all the beauty and wisdom of the books he used to read have turned to ashes. His mind seethes with intellectual and emotional energy. Yet, "crushed by inertia," he accomplishes nothing, having realized that all practical activity is ultimately meaningless. He is deeply alienated from humanity, society, and the people, although he admits that he has occasionally longed for communion with people. He is a "Petersburg type." He could only feel at home in that most abstract and cerebral city in the whole world, as Dostoevsky liked to call it. He was at one time a romantic inspired by "the good and the beautiful," but he has lost his ability to be inspired. In a word, the anti-hero is a sophisticated modern intellectual who faces the vanitas vanitatum of Ecclesiastes without God.

The anti-hero is not a social underdog. He retired from the civil service with the rank of a collegiate assessor. If he had stayed on, he would have made it to a respectable position in the Table of Ranks. He made a small inheritance that allowed him to retire early. His problems are not social or economic. However, he does have a historical dimension. The year is 1863 or 1864 (there is a reference to

the American Civil War in the text). He is forty, meaning that he was a young man in the 1840s, when German romantic idealism was in vogue in Russia. This is post-emancipation Russia. The enthusiasm over the reforms of Tsar Alexander II has waned and the revolutionary movement that threatens to destroy the very foundations of Russian society--the monarchy, the Church, and the family-- is on the way. The anti-hero challenges the revolutionaries' faith in historical determinism and the inevitability of social progress:

I, for one, wouldn't be the least surprised if, in that future age of reason, there suddenly appeared a gentleman with an ungrateful, or shall we say, retrogressive smirk, who, arms akimbo, would say:"What do you say, folks, let's send all this reason to hell, just to get all these logarithm tables out from under our feet and go back to our own stupid ways."(109-10)

The twentieth century has proved the anti-hero right. The savagery of the Holocaust was unthinkable in the nineteenth century.

Notes from Underground may be read as a study in neurotic behavior. Certainly, the anti-hero is not your normal, average citizen. But Dostoevsky contended that significant social trends, especially those of the imminent future, could be best recognized in "exceptional" or "extreme" types. An explicit statement to this effect occurs in the "Preface" to The Brothers Karamazov. The anti- hero's condition is, as Dostoevsky believed, the condition of the Russian intelligentsia, overstated for the sake of dramatic effect.

The anti-hero has gone "underground," spent his life in a "mousehole," figures of speech used to describe a person who fears "real life" and withdraws into cerebral non-existence

These notes are bound to produce an extremely unpleasant impression, because we've all lost touch with life and we're all cripples to some degree. We've lost touch to such an extent that we feel a disgust for life as it is really lived and cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we've reached a point where we consider real life as work--almost as painful labor--and we are secretly agreed that the way it is presented in literature is much better.(202-203)

The anti-hero starts his confession with the words "I'm a sick man," though the reader soon discovers that there is nothing particularly wrong with him physically. His is a mental sickness caused by excessive self-consciousness, which has various symptoms.

The anti-hero's heightened self-consciousness causes him to develop a "split personality." One of his "selves" observes the other, keeping up a constant "inner dialogue." As a result, he cannot arrive at any decisions, since anything that one "self" may decide is immediately contradicted by the other. A thought does not lead to action, but is hypostasized, made the subject of more thought and sublated (aufgehoben, Hegel's term meaning "raised to a higher level of understanding, preserved, and voided--all at the same time)- -and so on ad infinitum. The anti-hero repeatedly calls himself a liar, and with good reason, though it is never determined to what particular statement or statements this refers. It may be useful to recall a passage in Crime and Punishment, where Razumikhin delivers a discourse in praise of lying (Russian vrat', which implies not fraud or dissimulation but "invention" or "talking nonsense") as the road to truth.

The anti-hero is sensitive "like a dwarf or hunchback." He is so self-conscious he believes everybody's eyes are on him all the time. He believes that his face is "unspeakably revolting," although he is by all indications average looking. He has no self-respect: "After all, how can a man with my lucidity of perception respect himself?" (101) He is a hypochondriac, a sadist, and a masochist--all because of his inability to escape the vicious circle of his mental dialectics.

A Freudian interpretation of Notes from Underground is of course tempting. The cornerstone of such a reading is found at the beginning of Part I, Chapter v:

"How can one, after all, have the slightest respect for a man who tries to find pleasure in the feeling of humiliation himself? I'm not saying that out of any mawkish sense of repentance. In general, I couldn't stand saying 'Sorry, Papa, I'll never do it again.'"(101)

The text contains enough information to reconstruct, at least in a general fashion, the anti-hero's childhood and adolescence.

However, Dostoevsky's main concern was certainly not psychological, but philosophical. Notes from Underground is primarily a study in philosophical anthropology. Dostoevsky's anthropology radically differs from that of all his contemporaries save Søren Kierkegaard. (Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard were unaware of each other's existence. Friedrich Nietzsche, who had similar ideas, knew some of Dostoevsky's works, while Dostoevsky was not aware of Nietzsche.)5 The anthropology developed by the anti-hero sees man not in the abstract, as a member of human society, as a step on the evolutionary ladder of progress, or as a subject to be enlightened, educated, or saved, but as an individual, better yet, as a person, that is, concretely. The anti-hero's point is that while it is entirely possible, in fact quite normal, to imagine and to treat other human beings as objects--rationally, statistically, pedagogically, economically, etc.--it is quite impossible to deal with one's own self in this way. The anti-hero's anthropology tackles the human condition from the viewpoint of the self. Men are often dealt with like "piano keys" or "organ stops" (and worse), sometimes with the best of intentions; but no human being will consider himself a "piano key." The anti-hero vigorously advances this idea.

A corollary of the distinction between an objective and a subjective approach to man is a wholly different view of human free will. Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, taking the objective approach, had assumed that the environment determines men and that they act predictably depending on the conditions in which they find themselves. Dobrolyubov specifically applied this notion to the phenomenon of crime. The anti-hero takes the subjective approach: he--and he is willing to grant this to every human being--has a free will and will go to any length to assert it, even at the cost of personal disadvantage and suffering. Since the anti-hero, a weak character, finds it difficult to impose his will on the world around him, he creates for himself a mental world of his own. To maintain the integrity of this subjective world, he will sacrifice even a chance at living a "real life," love and happiness.

Dostoevsky's anti-hero is a voluntarist, though not in the sense of either of the two great German philosophers who had asserted the

primacy of the human will, Fichte optimistically and Arthur Schopenhauer (1786-1860) pessimistically. Rather, the anti-hero's voluntarism is the pragmatic one of Max Stirner.

Human freedom is stifled when man feels himself at the mercy of demonic powers and realizes that he is acting under some compulsion. This is clearly the case of the murder Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The anti-hero of Notes from Underground is equally compulsive, if not more so, but he has not reached the state where he would mutter "it must be the devil's doing."

Some thinkers, such as Leibnitz and Spinoza, and of course the Russian radicals led by Chernyshevsky feel at home in a clockwork universe where the laws of nature and the axioms of logic ("2x2=4") are God. The anti-hero rejects such a world out of hand. He chooses to live in a world where he can will that 2x2=5. The implication, not brought up in Notes from Underground, is that he arrogates the role of the Creator who can suspend the laws of nature and logic.

The anti-hero will have no part of a Hegelian world in which freedom is defined as being a conscious participant in the determinate process of evolutionary progress. Dobrolyubov, in particular, had been partial to this notion. The anti-hero sticks out his tongue at it. He claims for himself absolute and unchecked freedom of individual existence. He, however, does not attain the dramatic climax of this doctrine that Dostoevsky would first advance in The Idiot (1868-69), where Ippolit Terentyev proposes to commit suicide to assert his mastery of his own fate. Nevertheless, the anti-hero's freedom is entirely that of twentieth-century French Existentialism.

It was not Dostoevsky's intent to make his anti-hero the prophet of an atheist humanist philosophy of life. Rather, his intent was to demonstrate that he who would live such a philosophy would in fact be thrown all the way back to a state of demonic obsession, despair, and compulsive behavior. In Notes from Underground and in his subsequent novels, Dostoevsky sought to demonstrate that in a human world without God, where "all is lawful" (Ivan Karamazov's phrase), man loses his bearings, begins to flounder, and eventually becomes subject to suicidal or criminal compulsions, diabolic visitations, and physical, moral, and mental disintegration. The anti-hero of Notes from Underground is on the threshold of the condition reached by Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment, Kirillov of The Possessed, or Ivan Karamazov of The Brothers Karamazov.

The escape from the anti-hero's condition is a leap to what he can only define as "something quite different--something I long for, but cannot find" (120). This "something quite different" is faith and a world of absolute moral values, a world in which man is free to choose good or evil, Heaven or Hell. In the actual text, the anti-hero never gets around to seeing his condition in moral terms. The best he can do is recognize it as aesthetically repulsive and intellectually sterile:

"Of course, spinning long yarns about how I poisoned my life through moral disintegration in my musty hole, lack of contact with other men, and spite and vanity is not very interesting. I swear it has no literary interest, because what a novel needs is a hero, whereas here I have collected, as if deliberately, all the features of an anti-hero."(202)

One senses no feeling of guilt, contrition, or remorse in these lines, but one does sense that the anti-hero is near the breaking point.

On the positive side, the anti-hero has established that he possesses a free will and that he has a desire to bring his will in harmony with the world. He is stopped by that "wall" that less thoughtful and more sensible individuals choose to ignore: they live their lives without asking philosophical questions. The anti-hero is one of those who keep beating their heads against that wall, refusing to feel at home in a world in which materialist science is the ultimate truth. His mistake is that, like his descendant Ivan Karamazov, he uses only "Euclidean" reason in his attempts to get across or around that wall:

Obviously, in order to act, one must be fully satisfied and free of all misgivings beforehand. But take me: how can I ever be sure? Where will I find the primary reason for action, the justification for it? Where am I to look for it? I exercise my power of reasoning, and in my case, every time I think I have found a primary cause I see another cause that seems to be truly primary, and so on and so forth, indefinitely.(103)

In his later works Dostoevsky made it quite clear that he considered reason to be a bad guide in human affairs and that the man who was guided by his intuitions, by his conscience, and by his religious faith was far better off than he who trusted his reason. In Crime and Punishment, it is made explicit that Raskolnikov is saved only when he finally quits thinking. The anti-hero of Notes from Underground never gets that far.

The style of Notes from Underground is very much a part of Dostoevsky's argument. The very orality of the anti-hero's style, the way he provokes, mocks, torments, insults, and denounces his reader, suggests that one is being addressed personally. The anti- hero is talking to himself, but to his reader, too. At the end of his discourse, the reader is where Dostoevsky wanted him to be: puzzled, frustrated, and overwhelmed not only by the content, but also by the whole manner of the text. The most distinctive feature of the anti-hero's style is his refusal to stay put, his exasperating habit of contradicting himself, of withdrawing a statement no sooner he has made it, and of ironically undercutting even his most serious assertions. The implication of it all is that all this witty, provocative, and even profound talk is ultimately meaningless:

"I know, I know, I'm just a chatterbox, a harmless, boring chatterbox like all my kind. But how can I help it if it is the inescapable fate of every intelligent man to chatter, like filling an empty glass from an empty bottle?"(104)

The anti-hero anticipates twentieth-century logical positivism as he graphically demonstrates that what he presents to his reader amounts to no more than "language games" and that even the sharpest thinking will take one nowhere except ad absurda. Thus, the anti-hero and his reader are ripe for an epiphany, having reached a point at which they have "no place to go"--one of Dostoevsky's favorite phrases.

The epiphany never comes in Notes from Underground, perhaps thanks to "those pigs, the censors." If viewed outside the context

of Dostoevsky's later works, one may interpret this novel as a declaration of atheist existentialism. The "anti-hero" becomes the "hero" of a brave new world in which the consciousness of a lone human individual is God. Dostoevsky's later works show that this was not his intent.

Endnotes

1. The Russian title is Zapiski iz podpol'ya, where podpol'e is a compound of pod, "under," and pol, "floor." The noun podpol'e means both "space under the floor" (which explains the "mouse" imagery in the text) and "underground" in a metaphoric sense, as in a political "underground."

2. Quoted from Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ed. Joseph Frank and David I. Goldstein. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1989. 191.

3. This is the only way in which the anonymous narrator identifies himself in the text. Dostoevsky, as his "editor," calls him his "paradoxalist."

4. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. New York: New American Library, 1961. 110. All further references will be to this text. Page numbers will be given parenthetically.

5. Kirillov, a character in The Possessed, anticipates Nietzsche's philosophy and personal fate in an uncanny fashion.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Terras, Victor. "Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground." Short Story Criticism, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic, vol. 134, Gale,

2010. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420098363/LitRC?u=mill30389&sid=bookmark- LitRC&xid=92ae3260. Accessed 11 July 2021. Originally published in Dostoevsky's Polyphonic Talent, edited by Joe E. Barnhart, University Press of America, 2005, pp. 173-183.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420098363