FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY IS RENOWNED AS one of the world’s greatest novelists and literary psychologists. Born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a doctor, Dostoevsky was educated first at home and then at a boarding school. When he was a young boy, his father sent him to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering, from which he graduated in 1843. Dostoevsky had long been interested in writing, and after graduation he immediately resigned from his minor military post to devote his time to his craft. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), was immediately popular with critics.
Dostoevsky’s early view of the world was shaped by his experiences with social injustice. At the age of twenty-six, Dostoevsky became active in socialist circles, largely because of his opposition to the institution of serfdom. His political opinions were influenced by his experiences as a young boy—his father was murdered by his own serfs while Dostoevsky was away at school. Another experience that greatly affected Dostevsky, and that found its way into his writing, was the time he spent in prison. In April 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested for his participation in a group that illegally printed and distributed socialist propaganda. After spending eight months in prison, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death and was led, with other members of the group, to be shot. But the execution turned out to be only a show, meant to punish the prisoners psychologically. After his brush with death, Dostoevsky spent four years at a Siberian labor camp and then served in the military for another four years. During his time in prison, he rejected his extreme socialist views in favor of an adherence to traditional, conservative Russian values—a change in ideology that is evident throughout his later works.
Dostoevsky spent most of the 1860s in western Europe, immersing himself in the European culture that he believed was encroaching on Russia—an issue he explores in Notes from Underground. These years in Europe were a difficult time for Dostoevsky, as he struggled with poverty, epilepsy, and an addiction to gambling. The publication of Crime and Punishment (1866), however, brought him a reversal of fortune, earning him popular and critical success and rescuing him from financial disaster. His later novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) brought him further critical success.
Dostoevsky was one of the pioneers of realism in the modern novel, and Notes from Underground (1864), along with his later novels, belongs to this genre. Realist writers—Honoré de Balzac in France, Charles Dickens in England, and Nikolai Gogol and Dostoevsky in Russia, among others—reexamined the entire purpose of the novel. Realism focused on “real” people, generally city dwellers, prostitutes, poor students, lowly craftsmen, and other types of characters who had been merely subjects of ridicule or providers of comic relief in previous literature. Prior to realism, everyday life had been considered below literature, which was meant to rise above the mundane. Dostoevsky’s work, often seen as the culmination of realism, aims not to rise above reality, but to portray it in all its complexity and difficulty.
Notes from Underground played an important role in the development of realist fiction. The novel probes the mind of an individual on the margins of modern society, and examines the effects modern life has on that man’s personality. The protagonist is a low-ranking civil servant in 1860s St. Petersburg who has gradually gone mad over a lifetime of inability to cope with the society around him. The Underground Man is an antihero, the kind of downtrodden, indecisive victim of society that Dostoevsky would continue to explore in his later works.
Dostoevsky may have been prompted to write Notes from Underground in response to a revolutionary novel called What Is to Be Done? (1863), written by the “rational egoist” N. G. Chernyshevsky. Rational egoism held that life could be perfected solely through the application of reason and enlightened self-interest. Along with many other radical social thinkers of the 1860s, the rational egoists put great emphasis on the powers of reason and natural law—principles ostensibly derived from inherent properties of the world. The rational egoists’ theories grew out of the social liberalism of the 1840s, in which Dostoevsky was interested.
During his prison time in Siberia, however, Dostoevsky learned that the peasants and undereducated workers of Russia associated progressive thinkers with the upper classes that oppressed them and limited their freedom. He decided that the theorists of the 1860s were too absorbed in European culture, and too far removed from inherently Russian values. Dostoevsky grew to believe that the way to create harmony among all Russian people was through a return to traditional Russian values, such as personal responsibility, religion, brotherly love, and the family. He believed that theories that seek universal social laws to explain and govern human behavior ignore the fundamental individuality of the human soul, the complexity of human personality, and the power of free will.
The Underground Man in Notes from Underground is both a mouthpiece for Dostoevsky’s ideas and an example of the kind of problems that modern Russian society inevitably produced. Like Dostoevsky, the Underground Man is critical of rational egoism and other dangerously totalitarian visions of utopia. He is extremely critical of dogmatism of any kind. At the same time, he is a victim of the modern Russian urban experience. Deprived of positive social interactions, the Underground Man tries to relate to the world according to the codes and examples he finds in European literature. The failure of these attempts makes him even more bitter and isolated, driving him deeper underground.
THE ANONYMOUS NARRATOR of Notes from Underground is a bitter, misanthropic man living alone in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s. He is a veteran of the Russian civil service who has recently been able to retire because he has inherited some money. The novel consists of the “notes” that the man writes, a confused and often contradictory set of memoirs or confessions describing and explaining his alienation from modern society.
Notes from Underground is divided into two sections. The first, “Underground,” is shorter and set in the 1860s, when the Underground Man is forty years old. This section serves as an introduction to the character of the Underground Man, explaining his theories about his antagonistic position toward society.
The first words we hear from the Underground Man tell us that he is “a sick man . . . a wicked man . . . an unattractive man” whose self-loathing and spite has crippled and corrupted him. He is a well-read and highly intelligent man, and he believes that this fact accounts for his misery. The Underground Man explains that, in modern society, all conscious and educated men should be as miserable as he is. He has become disillusioned with all philosophy. He has appreciation for the sublime, Romantic idea of “the beautiful and lofty,” but he is aware of its absurdity in the context of his narrow, mundane existence.
The Underground Man has great contempt for nineteenth--century utilitarianism, a school of thought that attempted to use mathematical formulas and logical proofs to align man’s desires with his best interests. The Underground Man complains that man’s primary desire is to exercise his free will, whether or not it is in his best interests. In the face of utilitarianism, man will do nasty and unproductive things simply to prove that his free will is unpredictable and therefore completely free. This assertion partially explains the Underground Man’s insistence that he takes pleasure in his own toothaches or liver pains: such pleasure in pain is a way of spiting the comfortable predictability of life in modern society, which accepts without question the value of going to the doctor. The Underground Man is not proud of all this useless behavior, however. He has enormous contempt for himself as a human being. He is aware that he is so overcome by inertia that he cannot even become wicked enough to be a scoundrel, or insignificant enough to be an insect, or lazy enough to be a true lazybones.
The second fragment of Notes from Underground, entitled “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” describes specific events in the Underground Man’s life in the1840s, when he was twenty-four years old. In a sense, this section serves as a practical illustration of the more abstract ideas the Underground Man sets forth in the first section. This second section reveals the narrator’s progression from his youthful perspective, influenced by Romanticism and ideals of “the beautiful and lofty,” to his mature perspective in 1860, which is purely cynical about beauty, loftiness, and literariness in general.
“Apropos of the Wet Snow” describes interactions between the Underground Man and various people who inhabit his world: soldiers, former schoolmates, and prostitutes. The Underground Man is so alienated from these people that he is completely incapable of normal interaction with them. He treats them with a mixture of disgust and fear that results in his own effacement or humiliation—which in turn result in remorse and self-loathing.
The Underground Man’s alienation manifests itself in all kinds of relationships. When walking in the park, he obsesses about whether to yield the right of way to a soldier whom he does not even know. Then, in a confused attempt at social interaction, the Underground Man deliberately follows some school acquaintances to a dinner where he is not wanted, alternately insulting them openly and craving their attention and friendship. Later that same evening, the Underground Man attempts to rescue an attractive young prostitute named Liza by delivering impassioned, sentimental speeches about the terrible fate that awaits her if she continues to sell her body.
When Liza comes to visit the Underground Man in his shoddy apartment several days later, he reacts with shame and anger when he realizes she has reason to pity or look down upon him. The Underground Man continues to insult Liza throughout the visit. Hurt and confused, she leaves him alone in his apartment.
Here the Underground Man decides to end his notes. In a footnote at the end of the novel, Dostoevsky reveals that the Underground Man fails to make even this simple decision to stop writing, as Dostoevsky says that the manuscript of the notes goes on for many pages beyond the point at which he has chosen to cut it off.
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