Notes from Underground, also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters
from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is
considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself
as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator
who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the
story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks
emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be
Done?. The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow", and
describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing
the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator.
Plot summary The novel is divided into two parts.
= Part 1: "Underground"= It consists of an introduction, three
main sections and a conclusion. The short introduction propounds a number of
riddles whose meanings will be further developed. Chapters two, three and four
deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering; chapters five and six with
intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious "inertia"-inaction;
chapters seven through nine with theories of reason and logic; the last
two chapters are a summary and a transition into Part 2.
War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything
needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and
this is what determines human history. Secondly, the narrator's desire for
happiness is exemplified by his liver pain and toothache. This parallels
Raskolnikov's behavior in Dostoyevsky's later novel, Crime and Punishment. He
says that, due to the cruelty of society, human beings only moan about
pain in order to spread their suffering to others. He builds up his own paranoia
to the point he is incapable of looking his co-workers in the eye.
The main issue for the Underground Man is that he has reached a point of ennui
and inactivity. Unlike most people, who typically act out of revenge because
they believe justice is the end, the Underground Man is conscious of his
problems, feels the desire for revenge, but he does not find it virtuous; this
incongruity leads to spite and spite towards the act itself with its
concomitant circumstances. He feels that others like him exist, yet he
continuously concentrates on his spitefulness instead of on actions that
would avoid the problems he is so concerned with. He even admits at one
point that he’d rather be inactive out of laziness.
The first part also gives a harsh criticism of determinism and
intellectual attempts at dictating human action and behavior by logic, which the
Underground Man mentions in terms of a simple math problem two times two makes
four. He states that despite humanity’s attempt to create the "Crystal Palace,"
a reference to a famous symbol of utopianism in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s
What Is to Be Done?, one cannot avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time
can decide to act in a way which might not be considered to be in his or her
interests; and some will do so simply to validate their existence and to protest
and confirm that they exist as individuals. For 'interests' as a
general term is subjective and in the case of the Underground Man the good
here he's ridiculing is enlightened self-interest. It is this latter
position being depicted as logical and valid that the novel's protagonist
despises. Since his romantic embracing of this ideal, he seems to blame it for
his current base unhappiness. This type of rebellion is critical to later works
of Dostoyevsky as it is used by adolescents to validate their own
existence, uniqueness, and independence; rebellion in the face of the dysfunction
and disorder of adult experience that one inherits when reaching adulthood
under the understanding of tradition and society.
In other works, Dostoyevsky again confronts the concept of free will and
constructs a negative argument to validate free will against determinism
in the character Kirillov's suicide in his novel The Demons. Notes from
Underground marks the starting point of Dostoyevsky's move from psychological
and sociological themed novels to novels based on existential and general human
experience in crisis. = Part 2: "Apropos of the Wet Snow"=
The second part is the actual story and consists of three main segments that
lead to a furthering of the Underground Man's consciousness.
The first is his obsession with an officer who physically moves him out of
the way, seemingly without noticing his existence. He sees the officer on the
street and thinks of ways to take revenge, eventually deciding to bump
into him, which he does, finding to his surprise that the officer does not seem
to notice that it even happened. The second segment is a dinner party
with some old school friends to wish Zverkov, one of their number, goodbye as
he is being transferred out of the city. The underground man hated them when he
was younger, but after a random visit to Simonov’s, he decides to meet them at
the appointed location. They fail to tell him that the time has been changed
to six instead of five, so he arrives early. He gets into an argument with the
four after a short time, declaring to all his hatred of society and using them
as the symbol of it. At the end, they go off without him to a secret brothel,
and, in his rage, the underground man follows them there to confront Zverkov
once and for all, regardless if he is beaten or not. He arrives to find
Zverkov and company have apparently already retired with prostitutes to
other rooms. He then encounters Liza, a young prostitute, with whom he goes to
bed. The story cuts to Liza and the
underground man lying silently in the dark together. The underground man
confronts Liza with an image of her future, by which she is unmoved at
first, but, she eventually realizes the plight of her position and how she will
slowly become useless and will descend more and more, until she is no longer
wanted by anyone. The thought of dying such a terribly disgraceful death brings
her to realize her position, and she then finds herself enthralled by the
underground man’s seemingly poignant grasp of society’s ills. He gives her
his address and leaves. After this, he is overcome by the fear
of her actually arriving at his dilapidated apartment after appearing
such a "hero" to her and, in the middle of an argument with his servant, she
arrives. He then curses her and takes back everything he said to her, saying
he was, in fact, laughing at her and reiterates the truth of her miserable
position. Near the end of his painful rage he wells up in tears after saying
that he was only seeking to have power over her and a desire to humiliate her.
He begins to criticize himself and states that he is in fact horrified by
his own poverty and embarrassed by his situation. Liza realizes how pitiful he
is and tenderly embraces him. The underground man cries out "They—they
won't let me—I—I can't be good!" After all this, he still acts terribly
towards her, and, before she leaves, he stuffs a five ruble note into her hand,
which she throws onto the table. He tries to catch her as she goes out to
the street but cannot find her and never hears from her again. He tries to stop
the pain in his heart by "fantasizing", "And isn't it better, won't it be
better?...Insult — after all, it's a purification; it's the most caustic,
painful consciousness! Only tomorrow I would have defiled her soul and wearied
her heart. But now the insult will never ever die within her, and however
repulsive the filth that awaits her, the insult will elevate her, it will cleanse
her..." He recalls this moment as making him unhappy whenever he thinks of it,
yet again proving the fact from the first section that his spite for society
and his inability to act like it makes him unable to act better than it.
The concluding sentences recall some of the themes explored in the first part,
and the work as a whole ends with a note from the author that while there was
more to the text, "it seems that we may stop here."
References External links
Notes from the Underground at Project Gutenberg
Notes from Underground public domain audiobook at LibriVox
Academic journal article on Notes from Underground, Conference, Autumn 1998.
Full text of Notes from Underground in the original Russian
EDSITEment's Launchpad Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground